
Pass ' ■'' 



1W7 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



Two hundred and twenty-four copies printed 
in the month of March, 1897. 

This is No. 



LECTURES 

ON 

ENGLISH POETS 



BY / 

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 



— CALL UP HIM WHO LEFT HALF-TOLD 
THE STORY OF CAMBUSCAN BOLD." 



^ 



CLEVELAND ^%^— 

THE ROWFANT CLUB '^ 
MDCCCXCVII 






.'^ 



/ 






\ 



^\ 



Copyriglit, 1897, 
By The Rowfant Club. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Introduction, vii 

Lecture I, Definitions, 3 

Lecture II, Piers Ploughman's Vision, . 23 

Lecture III, The Metrical Romances, . . .39 

Lecture IV, The Ballads, .... 59 

Lecture V, Chaucer, 79 

Lecture VI, Spenser, 97 

Lecture VII, Milton, 117 

Lecture VIII, Butler, 135 

Lecture IX, Pope, 149 

Lecture X, Poetic Diction, .... 167 

Lecture XI, Wordsworth, 183 

Lecture XII, The Function of the Poet, . 199 




INTEODUCTION 

iHILST midway in his thirty-fifth year 
Lowell was appointed to deliver a course 
of lectures before the Institute founded 
by a relative, and bearing the family name. He 
was then known as the author of two volumes of 
poems besides the biting " Fable for Critics " and 
the tender '' Vision of Sir Launfal," and the nimbus 
was still brightly shining around the head of him 
who had created the tuneful " Hosea Biglow " and 
the erudite "Parson Wilbur." It was not the ac- 
cident of relationship that procured this appoint- 
ment; he had fairly earned the honor by his 
scholarly acquirements and poetly achievements. 
When the twelfth and last lecture had been de- 
livered, the correspondent of the "New York 
Evening Post " wrote : 

"Mr. Lowell has completed his course of lectures 
on English Poetry, which have been attended 



INTRODUCTION 

throughout by crowded audiences of the highest 
intelligence. The verdict of his hearers has been a 
unanimous one of approval and delight. Certainly 
no course of literary lectures has ever been deliv- 
ered here so overflowing with vigorous, serious 
thought, with sound criticism, noble, manly senti- 
ments, and genuine poetry. Mr. Lowell is a poet, 
and how could a true poet speak otherwise 1 

*' His appointment to the Professorship of Belles 
Lettres in Harvard College, made vacant by the 
resignation of Longfellow, is the very best that 
could have been made, and gives high satisfaction. 
It is such names that are a tower of strength and 
a crown of glory to our Alma Mater. Everett, 
Sparks, Ticknor, Longfellow, Agassiz, Peirce, are 
known iu their respective departments wherever 
science and polite letters have a foothold, and the 
nomination of James Russell Lowell as the asso- 
ciate and successor of such men is the most ' fit to 
be made.' " 

A quarter of a century after their delivery, one 
who heard them bore this testimony : " The lec- 
tures made a deep impression upon cultivated 
auditors, and full reports of them were printed in 
the Boston 'Advertiser.' Their success was due 
to their intrinsic merits. The popular lecturer is 
often led to imitate the vehement action of the 



INTRODUCTION 

stump-speaker and the drollery of the coraedian 
by turns. Mr. Lowell's pronunciation is clear 
and precise, and the modulations of his voice un- 
studied and agreeable, but he seldom if ever raised 
a hand for gesticulation, and his voice was kept in 
its natural compass. He read like one who had 
something of importance to utter, and the just em- 
phasis was felt in the penetrating tone. There 
were no oratorical climaxes, and no pitfalls set for 
applause. But the weighty thoughts, the earnest 
feeling, and the brilliant poetical images gave to 
every discourse an indescribable charm. The 
younger portion of the audience, especially, en- 
joyed a feast for which all the study of their lives 
had been a preparation." 

The same auditor, writing after Lowell's death, 
mentions them again : " In 1854 [it was really 
1855] Lowell delivered a course of twelve lectures 
on the British Poets at the Lowell Institute. They 
were not printed at the time, except, partially, in 
newspaper reports, but doubtless many of their 
ideas were absorbed in the published essays. In 
these lectures the qualities of his prose style began 
to be manifested. It was felt by every hearer to 
be the prose of a poet, as it teemed with original 
images, fortunate epithets, and artistically wrought 
allusions, and had a movement and music all its 



INTRODUCTION 

owu. A few friends from Carabridge attended these 
lectures, walking into the city, and more than once 
through deep snow. The lecturer humorously ac- 
knowledged his indebtedness to them, saying that 
when he saw their faces he was in the presence of 
his literary conscience. These lectures have not 
been published as yet, and may not be." 

Even while they were yet ringing in the ears of 
those delighted audiences, Ticknor and Fields were 
eager to publish them, but Lowell withheld consent. 
The lectures had been rapidly written, and needed 
the labor of the file, and this the unexpected duties 
of the equally unexpected professorship precluded. 
There were five applicants for the chair vacated by 
Longfellow, but Lowell was not one of them ; both 
his nomination and his appointment were made 
without his knowledge. He accepted the chair with 
the understanding that he should be allowed to 
spend one year abroad for some necessary study in 
G-ermany and Spain. Then his professorial duties 
engaged him and the "• Lectures on English Poets " 
were left as a waif stranded on the forgotten col- 
umns of a newspaper. When at length the oppor- 
tunity of leisure came Lowell found himself capable 



INTRODUCTION 

of better things, and he was satisfied with absorbing 
into later essays some fragments of the early lec- 
tures. There ended his concern for them ; but an 
enthusiastic hearer had preserved the Boston "Ad- 
vertiser's " reports of them in a special scrap-book, 
which ultimately became the property of the Uni- 
versity of Michigan and thus fell into the editor's 
hands, who felt the charm thereof, and was desir- 
ous of sharing his pleasure with the Rowfant Cluh. 

There is little doubt that Lowell had been too fas- 
tidious when he wrote to James T. Fields, in May, 
1855 : " It has just got through my skull, and made 
a dint into my sensorium, that you wrote me a note, 
ever so long ago, about my lectures and the publica- 
tion of them. I don't mean to print them yet — 
nor ever till they are better — but, at any rate, I con- 
sider myself one of your flock, though not, perhaps, 
as lanigerous as some of them." And when Lowell's 
literary executor wrote: " His powers of critical ap- 
preciation and reflection were displayed to advan- 
tage in these lectures. No such discourses had been 
heard in America. They added greatly to his repu- 
tation as critic, scholar, and poet," — there could be 
no hesitation in setting aside Lowell's modest self- 



INTRODUCTION 

depreciation. After the delivery of his first lecture, 
he had written to his friend Stillman: " So far as the 
public are concerned, I have succeeded." And his 
words are as true in 1896 as they were in 1855 ; and 
although his literary art was not so consummate as 
it became in his ultimate development, these early 
lectures will aid and encourage the student by show- 
ing his growth : we see the rivulet become the flow- 
ing river. 

We share, too, in the delight of his first audience 
on reading : 

" The lines of Dante seem to answer his every 
mood : sometimes they have the compressed implac- 
ability of his lips, sometimes they ring like an angry 
gauntlet thrown down in defiance, and sometimes 
they soften or tremble as if that stern nature would 
let its depth of pity show itself only in a quiver of 
the voice." 

" So in ' Paradise Lost ' not only is there the pomp 
of long passages that move with the stately glitter 
of Milton's own angelic squadrons, but if you meet 
anywhere a single verse, that, too, is obstinately 
epic, and you recognize it by its march as certainly 
as you know a friend by his walk." 

"Who can doubt the innate charm of rhyme 
whose eye has ever been delighted by the visible 
consonance of a tree growing at once toward an 



INTRODUCTION 

upward and a downward heaven, on the edge of the 
unrippled river; or as the kingfisher flits from shore 
to shore, his silent echo flies under him and com- 
pletes the vanishing couplet in the visionary world 
below." 

" Every desire of the heart flnds its gratification 
in the poet because he always speaks imaginatively 
and satisfies ideal hungers." 

And see, too, how the " powers of critical appre- 
ciation " that Professor Norton has mentioned were 
bursting into blossom and giving promise of the 
golden harvest to come: 

" Sir Thomas Browne, * * * r^ j^^g^i-^ 
who gives proof of more imagination than any other 
Englishman except Shakspeare." 

For subtlety and depth of insight Lowell has 
never excelled this early example, nor has he ever 
outdone the critical estimate, so true and so terse, 
of his final pronouncement upon Pope : 

" Measured by any high standard of imagination, 
he will be found wanting ; tried by any test of wit, 
he is unrivaled." 

And what of such a shining felicity as where he 
meets Sir Thomas Browne on common ground and 



INTRODUCTION 

the author of " ReHgio Medici" gravely smiles and 
acknowledges kinship : 

" If a naturalist showed us a toad we should feel 
indifferent, but if he told us that it had been found 
in a block of granite we should instantly look with 
profound interest on a creature that perhaps ate 
moths in Abel's garden or hopped out of the path 
of Lamech." 

Most truly " No such lectures had been heard in 
America," and as truly they deserve to be made 
more than a delightful memory for the early 
hearers alone. 

Lowell wrote to a friend that at his first lecture 
he had held his audience for an hour and a quar- 
ter, but the reporter's notes of that lecture fall far 
short of that fullness ; nevertheless, compared with 
Anstey's shorthand notes of Carlyle's lectures on 
the "" History of Literature," we come much nearer 
to the living voice in the Boston '' Advertiser's " 
reports of these Lowell lectures. Carlyle spoke 
without a written text, nor had he any notes save a 
few bits of paper which in his hyper-nervousness he 
twisted out of all hope of reportorial decipherment — 
and without once looking at them ; Lowell had his 



INTRODUCTION 

manuscripts (written currente calmno, for the new 
wine of life was in full ferment and it was no small 
feat to bottle any of it successfully), and we are as- 
sured from internal evidence that the " Adver- 
tiser's" reporter was allowed access to them. His 
text has a fang as characteristic as Thoreau's wild 
apples, and we do not feel the dubiety of the blind 
patriarch, " The voice is Jacob's, but the hands are 
Esau's." No ; it is James Eussell Lowell, his voice, 
his inimitable mark, and these are his words sound- 
ing in our ears after half a century. 

The only attempt at " editing " has been as far as 
possible to reproduce the reporter's " copy." To that 
end Lowell's profusion of capitals is retained (and 
the reader will bear in mind that the Transcendental 
spirit was then in both the air and the alphabet), 
and even his italics, suggested, as Mr. Underwood 
says, by the speaker's emphasis, find their respective 
places. Here and there a compositor's error has 
been corrected and a proof-reader's oversight ad- 
justed; sometimes this has been conjectural, and 
again the needful change was obvious. In all else, 
save the applause, this Rowfant Book may be called 
a faint echo of the Lowell Institute Lectures. 



INTRODUCTION 

It is " printed, but not published" in loving fealty 
to Lowell's memory, and every Rowfanter has at 
heart the assurance that his Shade will look upon 
this literary flotsam without a frown, or with one 
that will soon fade into forgiveness. 

S. A. J. 

Ann Arboe, November 10th, 1896. 



LECTUEE I 

DEFINITIONS 

(Tuesday Evening^ January 9, 1855] 



ME. LOWELL began by expressing his sense of 
the responsibility he had assumed in under- 
taking a course of lectures on English Poets. Few 
men, he said, had in them twelve hours of talk that 
would be worth hearing on any subject; but on a 
subject like poetry no person could hope to combine 
in himself the qualities that would enable him to 
do justice to his theme. A lecturer on science has 
only to show how much he knows — the lecturer 
on Poetry can only be sure how much \\q feels. 

Almost everybody has a fixed opinion about the 
merits of certain poets which he does not like to 
have disturbed. There are no fanaticisms so ardent 
as those of Taste, especially in this country, where 
we are so accustomed to settle everything by vote 
that if a majority should decide to put a stop to the 
precession of the Equinoxes we should expect to 
hear no more of that interesting ceremony. 

A distinguished woman [Mrs. Stowe] who has 
lately published a volume of travels, affirms that it 
is as easy to judge of painting as of poetry by in- 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

stinct. It is as easy. But without reverent study 
of their works no instinct is competent to judge 
of the masters of either art. 

Yet every one has a right to his private opinion, 
and the critic should deal tenderly with illusions 
which give men innocent pleasure. You may 
sometime see japonicas carved out of turnips, and 
if a near-sighted friend should exclaim, "What a 
pretty japonica ! " do not growl " Turnip ! " unless, 
on discovering his mistake, he endeavors to prove 
that the imitation is as good as the real flower. 

In whatever I shall say, continued Mr. Lowell, 
I shall, at least, have done my best to think before 
I speak, making no attempt to say anything new, 
for it is only strange things and not new ones that 
come by effort. In looking up among the starry 
poets I have no hope of discovering a new Kepler's 
law — one must leave such things to great mathe- 
maticians like Peirce. I shall be content with re- 
sohdng a nebula or so, and bringing to notice some 
rarer shade of color in a double star. In our day 
a lecturer can hardly hope to instruct. The press 
has so diffused intelligence that everybody has just 
misinformation enough on every subject to make 
him thoroughly uncomfortable at the misinforma- 
tion of everybody else. 

Mr. Lowell then gave a brief outline of his course, 



DEFINITIONS 

stating that this first lecture would indicate his 
point of view, and treat in part of the imaginative 
faculty. 

After some remarks upon Dr. Johnson's "Lives 
of the Poets," the lecturer proceeded: Any true 
criticism of poetry must start from the axiom that 
what distinguishes that which we call the poetical in 
anything, and makes it so, is that it transcends the 
understanding, by however little or much, and is 
interpreted by the intuitive operation of some quite 
other faculty of the mind. It is precisely the some- 
thing-more of feeling, of insight, of thought, of ex- 
pression which for the moment lulls that hunger 
for the superfluous which is the strongest appetite 
we have, and which always gives the lie to the 
proverb that enough is as good as a feast. The 
boys in the street express it justly when they define 
the indefinable merit of something which pleases 
them, by saying it is a touch beyond — or it is first- 
rate and a half. The poetry of a thing is this touch 
beyond, this third half on the farther side of first- 
rate. 

Dr. Johnson said that that only was good poetry 
out of which good prose could be made. But poe- 
try cannot be translated into prose at all. Its con- 
densed meaning may be paraphrased, and you get 
the sense of it, but lose the condensation which is 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

a part of its essence. If on Christmas day you 
should give your son a half-eagle, and should pres- 
ently take it back, and give him the excellent prose 
version of five hundred copper cents, the boy would 
doubtless feel that the translation had precisely 
the same meaning in tops, balls, and gibraltars; but 
the feeling of infinite riches in a little room, of be- 
ing able to carry in his waistcoat pocket what Dr. 
Johnson would have called the potentiality of tops 
and balls and gibraltars beyond the dreams of avar- 
ice — this would have evaporated. By good prose 
the Doctor meant prose that was sensible and had 
a meaning. But he forgot his own theory some- 
times when he thought he was writing poetry. 
How would he contrive to make any kind of sense 
of what he says of Shakspeare I that 

Panting Time toiled after him iu vain. 

The difference between prose and poetry is one 
of essence and not one of accident. What may be 
called the negatively poetical exists everywhere. 
The life of almost every man, however prosaic to 
himself, is full of these dumb melodies to his neigh- 
bor. The farmer looks from the hillside and sees 
the tall ship lean forward with its desire for the 
ocean, every full-hearted sail yearning seaward, and 
takes passage with her from his drudgery to the 



DEFINITIONS 

beautiful conjectured land. Meanwhile he himself 
has Pegasus yoked to his plough without knowing 
it, and the sailor, looking back, sees him sowing his 
field with the graceful idyl of summer and harvest. 
Little did the needle-woman dream that she was 
stitching passion and pathos into her weary seam, 
till Hood came and found them there. 

The poetical element may find expression either 
in prose or verse. The " Undine " of Fouque is poeti- 
cal, but it is not poetry. A prose writer may have 
imagination and fancy in abundance and yet not 
be a poet. What is it, then, that peculiarly distin- 
guishes the poet ! It is not merely a sense of the 
beautiful, but so much keener joy in the sense of it 
(arising from a greater fineness of organization) that 
the emotion must 5m^, instead of only speaking itself. 

The first great distinction of poetry is form or 
arrangement. This is not confined to poems alone, 
but is found involved with the expression of the po- 
etical in all the Arts. It is here that the statue bids 
good-bye to anatomy and passes beyond it into the 
region of beauty ; that the painter passes out of the 
copyist and becomes the Artist. 

Mr. Lowell here quoted Spenser's statement of 
Plato's doctrine: 

For of the soul the body form doth take, 
For soul is form and doth the body make. 

7 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

This coordination of the spirit and form of a 
poem is especially remarkable in the " Divina Corn- 
media" of Dante and the "Paradise Lost" of Mil- 
ton, and that not only in the general structure, but 
in particular parts. The lines of Dante seem to 
answer his every mood : sometimes they have the 
compressed implacability of his lips, sometimes they 
ring like an angry gauntlet thrown down in de- 
fiance, and sometimes they soften or tremble as if 
that stern nature would let its depth of pity show 
itself only in a quiver of the voice; but always 
and everywhere there is subordination, and the 
pulse of the measure seems to keep time to the foot- 
fall of the poet along his fated path, as if a fate 
were on the verses too. And so in the " Paradise 
Lost " not only is there the pomp of long passages 
that move with the stately glitter of Milton's own 
angelic squadrons, but if you meet anywhere a 
single verse, that, too, is obstinately epic, and you 
recognize it by its march as certainly as you know 
a friend by his walk. 

The instinctive sensitiveness to order and pro- 
portion, this natural incapability of the formless 
and vague, seems not only natural to the highest 
poetic genius, but to be essential to the universality 
and permanence of its influence over the minds of 
men. The presence of it makes the charm of Pope's 

8 



DEFINITIONS 

" Rape of the Lock " perennial ; its absence will al- 
ways prevent such poems as the "Faery Queene," 
"Hudibras," and the "Excursion" (however full of 
beauty, vivacity, and depth of thought) from being 
popular. 

Voltaire has said that epic poems were discourses 
which at first were written in verse only because it 
was not yet the custom to narrate in prose. But 
instead of believing that verse is an imperfect and 
undeveloped prose, it seems much more reasonable 
to conclude it the very consummation and fortunate 
blossom of speech, as the flower is the perfection 
towards which the leaf yearns and climbs, and in 
which it at last attains to fullness of beauty, of 
honey, of perfume, and the power of reproduction. 

There is some organic law of expression which, 
as it must have dictated the first formation of lan- 
guage, must also to a certain extent govern and 
modulate its use. That there is such a law a com- 
mon drum-head will teach us, for if you cover it 
with fine sand and strike it, the particles will ar- 
range themselves in a certain regular order in sym- 
pathy with its vibrations. So it is well known 
that the wood of a violin shows an equal sensibility, 
and an old instrument is better than a new one 
because all resistance has been overcome. I have 
observed, too, as something that distinguishes sing- 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

ing birds from birds of prey, that their flight is 
made up of a series of parabolic curves, with rests 
at regular intervals, produced by a momentary fold- 
ing of the wings ; as if the law of their being were 
in some sort metrical and thejfleiv musically. 

Who can doubt the innate charm of rhyme whose 
eye has ever been delighted by the visible conso- 
nance of the tree growing at once toward an up- 
ward and a downward heaven on the edge of an 
unrippled river ; or, as the kingfisher flits from shore 
to shore, his silent echo flies under him and com- 
pletes the vanishing couplet in the visionary world 
below I Who can question the divine validity of 
number, proportion, and harmony, who has studied 
the various rhythms of the forest ? Look for ex- 
ample at the pine, how its branches, balancing each 
other, ray out from the tapering stem in stanza after 
stanza, how spray answers to spray, and leaf to leaf 
in ordered strophe and antistrophe, till the perfect 
tree stands an embodied ode, through which the un- 
thinking wind cannot wander without finding the 
melody that is in it and passing away in music. 

Language, as the poets use it, is something more 
than an expedient for conveying thought. If mere 
meaning were all, then would the Dictionary be al- 
ways the most valuable work in any tongue, for in 
it exist potentially all eloquence, all wisdom, all 

10 



DEFINITIONS 

pathos, and all wit. It is a great wild continent of 
words ready to be tamed and subjugated, to have 
its meanings and uses applied. The prose writer 
finds there his quarry and his timber ; but the poet 
enters it like Orpheus, and makes its wild inmates 
sing and dance and keep joyous time to every 
wavering fancy of his lyre. 

All language is dead invention, and our conver- 
sational currency is one of shells like that of some 
African tribes — shells in which poetic thoughts once 
housed themselves, and colored with the tints of 
morning. But the poet can give back to them their 
energy and freshness; can conjure symbolic powers 
out of the carnal and the trite. For it is only an 
enchanted sleep, a simulated death, that benumbs 
laDguage; and see how, when the true prince-poet 
comes, the arrested blood and life are set free again 
by the touch of his fiery lips, and as Beauty awakens 
through all her many-chambered palace runs a thrill 
as of creation, giving voice and motion and intelli- 
gence to what but now were dumb and stiffened 
images. 

The true reception of whatever is poetical or im- 
aginative presupposes a more exalted, or, at least, 
excited, condition of mind both in the poet and the 
reader. To take an example from daily life, look at 
the wholly diverse emotions with which a partizan 

11 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

and an indifferent person read the same political 
newspaper. The one thinks the editor a very sound 
and moderate person whose opinion is worth hav- 
ing on a practical question ; the other wonders to 
see one very respectable citizen drawn as a Jupiter 
Tonans, with as near an approach to real thunder- 
bolts as printer's ink and paper will concede, and 
another, equally respectable and a member of the 
same church, painted entirely black, with horns, 
hoofs, and tail. The partizan is in the receptive 
condition just spoken of; the indifferent occupies 
the solid ground of the common sense. 

To illustrate the superiority of the poetic imagi- 
nation over the prosaic understanding, Mr. Lowell 
quoted a story told by Le Grand in a note to one of 
his " Fabliaux." A sinner lies dying, and an angel 
and a fiend, after disputing the right to his soul, 
agree to settle the affair by a throw of dice. The 
fiend gets the first chance, and the fatal cubes come 
up — two sixes ! He chuckles and rubs his claws, 
for everybody knows that no higher number is pos- 
sible. But the angel thinks otherwise, throws, and, 
behold, a six and seven ! And thus it is, that when 
the understanding has done its best, when it has 
reached, as it thinks, down to the last secret of 
music and meaning that language is capable of, 
the poetical sense comes in with its careless mir- 

12 



DEFINITIONS 

acle, and gets one more point than there are in 
the dice. 

Imagination is not necessarily concerned with 
poetic expression. Nothing can be more poetical 
than the lines of Henry More the Platonist : 

What doth move 
The nightingale to sing so fresh and clear? 
The thrush or lark, that mounting high above, 
Chants her shrill notes to heedless ears of corn, 
Heavily hanging in the dewy morn. 

But compare it with Keats' 

Ruth, when sick for home. 
She stood in tears amid the alien corn. 

The imagination has touched that word "alien," 
and in it we see the field through Ruth's eyes, as 
she looked round on the hostile spikes, and not 
through those of the poet. 

Imagination enters more or less into the compo- 
sition of all great minds, all minds that have what 
we call hreadth as distinguished from mere force 
or acuteness. We find it in philosophers like Plato 
and Bacon, in discoverers like Kepler and Newton, 
in fanatics like George Fox, and in reformers like 
Luther. 

The shape which the imaginative faculty will take 

13 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

is modified by the force of the other qualities with 
which it is coordinated in the mind. If the moral 
sense predominates, the man becomes a reformer, 
or a fanatic, and his imagination gets itself uttered 
in his life. Bunyan would have been nothing but 
a fanatic, if he had not been luckily shut up in 
Bedford jail, alone with his imagination, which, 
unable to find vent in any other way, possessed 
and tortured him till it had wrung the " Pilgrim's 
Progress" out of him — a book the nearest to a 
poem, without being one, that ever was written. 
Uniting itself with the sense of form. Imagina- 
tion makes a sculptor; with those of form and color, 
a painter ; with those of time and tune, a musician. 
For in itself it is dumb, and can find expression 
only through the help of some other faculty. 

Imaginsition plus the poetic sense is poesy, minus 
the poetic sense it is science, though it may clothe 
itself in verse. To those who are familiar with Dr. 
Donne's verses, I need only mention his name as a 
proof of my last position. He solves problems in 
rhyme, that is all. 

Shakspeare was so charged with the highest 
form of the poetic imagination, as some persons are 
with electricity, that he could not point his finger 
at a word without a spark of it going out of him. 
I will illustrate it by an example taken at random 

14 



DEFINITIONS 

from him. When Romeo is parting from Juliet, 
Shakspeare first projects his own mind into Ro- 
meo, and then, as Romeo becomes so possessed with 
the emotion of the moment that his words take 
color from it, all nature is infected and is full of 
partings. He says: 

But look what envious streaks 
Do lace the severing clouds. 

Shakspeare's one hundred and thirteenth sonnet 
was here also quoted in illustration. 

The highest form of imagination, Mr. Lowell said, 
is the dramatic, of which Shakspeare must always 
stand for the only definition. Next is the narra- 
tive imagination, where the poet forces his own 
personal consciousness upon us and makes our 
senses the slaves of his own. Of this kind Dante's 
''Divina Commedia" is the type. Below this are 
the poems in which the imagination is more dif- 
fused; where the impression we receive is rather 
from mass than from particulars ; where single lines 
are not so strong in themselves as in forming in- 
tegral portions of great sweeps of verse; where 
effects are produced by allusion and suggestion, by 
sonorousness, by the use of names which have a 
traditional poetic value. Of this kind Milton is 
the type. 

15 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

Lastly, said Mr. Lowell, I would place in a class 
by themselves those poets who have properly no 
imagination at all, but only a pictorial power. 
These we may call the imaginary poets, writers who 
give us images of things that neither they nor we 
believe in or can be deceived by, like pictures from 
a magic lantern. Of this kind are the Oriental 
poems of Southey, which show a knowledge of Asi- 
atic mythologies, but are not livingly mythologic. 

Where the imagination is found in combination 
with great acuteness of intellect, we have its sec- 
ondary or prose form. Lord Bacon is an example 
of it. Sir Thomas Browne is a still more remarka- 
ble one — a man who gives proof of more imagina- 
tion than any other Englishman except Shakspeare. 

Fancy is a frailer quality than Imagination, and 
cannot breathe the difficult air of the higher re- 
gions of intuition. In combination with Sentiment 
it produces poetry; with Experience, wit. The 
poetical faculty is in closer affinity with Imagina- 
tion ; the poetical temperament with Fancy. Con- 
trast Milton with Herrick or Moore. In illustra- 
tion Mr. Lowell quoted from Marvell, the poet of all 
others whose fancy hints always at something be- 
yond itself, and whose wit seems to have been fed 
on the strong meat of humor. 

As regards 7nan, Fancy takes delight in life, man- 

16 



DEFINITIONS 

ners, and the result of culture, in what may be 
called Scenery; Imagination is that mysterious 
something which we call Nature — the unf athomed 
base on which Scenery rests and is sustained. 
Fancy deals with feeling; Imagination with pas- 
sion. I have sometimes thought that Shakspeare, in 
the scene of the " Tempest," intended to typify the 
isle of Man^ and in the characters, some of the lead- 
ing qualities or passions which dwell in it. It is 
not hard to find the Imagination in Prospero, the 
Fancy in Ariel, and the Understanding in Caliban ; 
and, as he himself was the poetic imagination in- 
carnated, is it considering too nicely to think that 
there is a profound personal allusion in the break- 
ing of Prosperous wand and the burying of his book 
to the nature of that man who, after such thauma- 
turgy, could go down to Stratford and live there 
for years, only collecting his dividends from the 
Globe Theatre, lending money on mortgage, and 
leaning over the gate to chat and chaffer with his 
neighbors ! 

1 think that every man is conscious at times that 
it is only his borders, his seaboard, that is civilized 
and subdued. Behind that narrow strip stretches 
the untamed domain, shaggy, unexplored, of the 
natural instincts. Is not this so! Then we can nar- 
row our definition yet farther, and say that Fancy 

2 17 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

and Wit appear to the artificial man ; Imagination 
and Humor to the natural man. Thus each of us 
in his dual capacity can at once like Chaucer and 
Pope, Butler and Jean Paul, and bury the hatchet 
of one war of tastes. 

And now, finally, what is the secret of the great 
poet's power over us ? There is something we love 
better than love, something that is sweeter to us 
than riches, something that is more inspiring to us 
than success — and that is the imagination of them. 
No woman was ever loved enough, no miser was 
ever rich enough, no ambitious man ever success- 
ful enough, but in imagination. Every desire of 
the heart finds its gratification in the poet because 
he speaks always imaginatively and satisfies ideal 
hungers. We are the always-welcome guests of his 
ennobling words. 

This, then, is why the poet has always been held 
in reverence among men. All nature is dumb, and 
we men have mostly but a stunted and stuttering 
speech. But the longing of every created thing is 
for utterance and expression. The Poet's office, 
whether we call him Seer, Prophet, Maker, or 
Namer, is always this — to be the Voice of this lower 
world. Through him, man and nature find at last 
a tongue by which they can utter themselves and 
speak to each other. The beauties of the visible 

18 






DEFINITIONS 

world, the trembling attractions of tlie invisible, 
the hopes and desires of the heart, the aspirations 
of the sonl, the passions and the charities of men ; 
nay, the trees, the rocks, our poor old speechless 
mother, the earth herself, become voice and music, 
and attain to that humanity, a divine instinct of 
which is implanted in them all. 



19 



LECTUEE II 

PIERS PLOUGHMAN'S VISION 

{Friday Evening, January 12, 1855) 



1 



II 



TN literature, as in religion and politics, there is 
a class of men who may be called Fore-runners. 
As there were brave men before Agamemnon, so 
there must have been brave poets before Homer. 
All of us, the great as well as the little, are the re- 
sult of the entire Past. It is but just that we should 
remember now and then that the very dust in the 
beaten highways of thought is that of perhaps 
nameless saints and heroes who thought and suf- 
fered and died to make commonplace practicable to 
us. Men went to the scaffold or the stake for ideas 
and principles which we set up in our writings and 
our talk as thoughtlessly as a printer sticks his 
type, and the country editor, when he wrote his last 
diatribe on the freedom of the press, dipped his pen 
without knowing it in the blood of the martyrs. It 
would be well for us to remember, now and then, 
our dusty benefactors, and to be conscious that we 
are under bonds to the Present to the precise 
amount that we are indebted to the Past. 

Thus, from one point of view, there is nothing 

23 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

more saddening than a biographical dictionary. It 
is like a graveyard of might-have-beens and used- 
to-be's, of fames that never ripened and of fames 
already decayed. Here lies the great Thinker who 
stammered and could not find the best word for his 
best thought, and so the fame went to some other 
who had the gift of tongues. Here lies the gatherer 
of great masses of learning from which another was 
to distil the essence, and to get his name upon all 
the phials and show-bills. But if these neglected 
headstones preach the vanity of a selfish ambition, 
they teach also the better lesson that every man's 
activity belongs not to himself but to his kind, 
and whether he will or not must serve at last some 
other, greater man. We are all foot-soldiers, and 
it is out of the blood of a whole army of us that 
iron enough is extracted to make the commemora- 
tive sword that is voted to the great Captain. 

In that long aqueduct which brings the water of 
life down to us from its far sources in the Past, 
though many have done honest day-labor in build- 
ing it, yet the keystone that unites the arch of 
every period is engraved with the name of the 
greatest man alone. These are our landmarks, 
and mentally we measure by these rather than by 
any scheme of Chronology. If we think of Phi- 
losophy, we think of four or five great names, and 

24 



PIERS PLOUGHMAN'S VISION 

SO of Poetry, Astronomy, and the rest. Geology 
may give what age she will to the globe ; it matters 
not, it will still be only so many great men old; 
and wanting these, it is in vain that Egypt and As- 
syria show ns their long bead-roll of vacant centu- 
ries. It is in the life of its great men that the life 
and thought of a people becomes statuesque, rises 
into poetry, and makes itself sound out clearly in 
rhythm and harmony. 

These great persons get all the fame and all the 
monuments like the generals of armies, though ive 
may lead the forlorn hope, or make a palpitating 
bridge with our bodies in the trenches. Rank and 
file may grumble a little — but it is always so, and 
always must be so. Fame would not be fame if it 
were or could be divided infinitesimally, and every 
man get his drachm and scruple. It is good for 
nothing unless it come in a lump. And besides, if 
every man got a monument or an epitaph who felt 
quite sure he deserved it, would marble hold out, 
or Latin ! 

The fame of a great poet is made up of the sum 
of all the appreciations of many succeeding genera- 
tions, each of which he touches at some one point. 
He is like a New World into which explorer after ex- 
plorer enters, one to botanize, one to geologize, one 
to ethnologize, and each bringing back his report. 

25 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

His great snowy mountains perhaps only one man 
in a century goes to the top of and comes back to 
tell us how he saw from them at once the two great 
oceans of Life and Death, the Atlantic out of which 
we came, the Pacific toward which we tend. 

Of the poet we do not ask everything, but the 
best expression of the lest of everything. If a man 
attain this but once, though only in a frail song, 
he is immortal; while every one who falls just 
short of it, if only by a hair's breadth, is as sure 
to be forgotten. There is a wonderful secret that 
poets have not yet learned, and this is that small 
men cannot do great things, but that the small man 
who can do small things hest is great. The most 
fatal ill-success is to almost succeed, as, in Italy, 
the worst lemons are those large ones which come 
nearest to being oranges. The secret of permanent 
fame is to express some idea the most compactly, 
whether in your life, your deed, or your writing. 
I think that if anything is clear in history, it is 
that every idea, whether in morals, politics, or art, 
which is laboring to express itself, feels of many 
men and throws them aside before it finds the one 
in whom it can incarnate itself. The noble idea 
of the Papacy (for it tvas a noble one — nothing 
less than the attempt to embody the higher law in 
a human institution) whispered itself to many be- 



PIERS PLOUGHMAN'S VISION 

fore it got the man it wanted in Gregory the Great. 
And Protestantism carried numbers to the stake ere 
it entered into Luther : a man whom nature made 
on purpose — all asbestos so that he could not burn. 
Doubtless Apollo spoiled many a reed before he 
found one that would do to pipe through even to 
the sheep of Admetus, and the land of song is scat- 
tered thick with reeds which the Muse has experi- 
mented with and thrown away. 

It is from such a one that I am going to try to 
draw a few notes of music and of mirth to-night. 
Contemporary with Chaucer lived a man who satir- 
ized the clergy and gave some lively pictures of 
manners before the " Canterbury Tales " were writ- 
ten. His poem was very popular, as appears from 
the number of manuscript copies of it remaining, 
and after being forgotten for two centuries, it was 
revived again, printed, widely read, and helped on- 
ward the Eeformation in England. It has been re- 
printed twice during the present century. This 
assures us that it must have had a good deal of 
original force and vivacity. It may be considered, 
however, to be tolerably defunct now. This poem 
is the vision of Piers Ploughman. 

I have no hope of reviving it. Dead poets are 
something very dead, and critics blow their trum- 
pets over them in vain. What I think is interesting 

27 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

and instructive in the poem is that it illustrates in 
a remarkable manner what may be considered the 
Anglo-Saxon element in English poetry. I refer to 
race, and not to language. We find here a vigorous 
common-sense, a simple and hearty love of nature, 
a certain homely tenderness, held in check always 
by a dogged veracity. Instead of Fancy we have 
Feeling ; and, what more especially deserves notice, 
there is almost an entire want of that sense of form 
and outline and proportion which alone brings any- 
thing within the province of Art. Imagination 
shows itself now and then in little gleams and 
flashes, but always in the form of Humor. For the 
basis of the Anglo-Saxon mind is beef and beer; 
what it considers the real as distinguished from, 
or rather opposed to, the ideal. It spares nothing 
merely because it is beautiful. It is the Anglo- 
Saxon who invented the word Humbug, the potent 
exorcism which lays the spirit of poetry in the Red 
Sea. It is he who always translates Shows into 
Shams. 

Properly speaking, "Piers Ploughman's Vision" 
is not a poem at all. It is a sermon rather, for 
no verse, the chief end of which is not the repre- 
sentation of the beautiful, and whose moral is not 
included in that, can be called poetry in the true 
sense of the word. A thought will become poetical 

28 



PIERS PLOUGHMAN'S VISION 

by being put into verse when a horse hair will turn 
into a snake by being laid in water. The poetical 
nature will delight in Mary Magdalen more for her 
fine hair than for her penitence. But whatever is 
poetical in this book seems to me characteristically 
Saxon. The English Muse has mixed blood in her 
veins, and I think that what she gets from the 
Saxon is a certain something homely and practical, 
a flavor of the goodwife which is hereditary. She 
is the descendant on one side of Poor Richard, in- 
spired, it is true, but who always brings her knit- 
ting in her pocket. The light of the soul that 
shines through her countenance, that "light that 
never was on land or sea," is mingled with the warm 
glow from the fireside on the hearth of Home. In- 
deed, may it not be attributed to the Teutonic 
heart as something peculiar to it, that it has breadth 
enough to embrace at once the chimney-corner and 
the far-reaching splendors of Heaven ? Happy for 
it when the smoke and cookery-steam of the one 
do not obscure the other! 

I find no fault with the author of Piers Plough- 
man for not being a poet. Every man cannot be a 
poet (fortunately), nor every poet a great one. It 
is the privilege of the great to be always contem- 
poraneous, to speak of fugacious events in words 
that shall be perennial. But to the poets of the 

29 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

second rate we go for pictures of manners that have 
passed away, for transitory facts, for modes of life 
and ways of thinking that were circumstantial 
merely. They give us reflections of our outward, 
as their larger brethren do of our inward, selves. 
They deal, as it were, with costume ; the other with 
man himself. 

But these details are of interest, so fond are we 
of facts. We all have seen the congregation which 
grew sleepy while the preacher talked of the other 
world give a stir of pleased attention if he brought 
in a personal anecdote about this. Books are writ- 
ten and printed, and we read them to tell us how 
our forefathers cocked their hats, or turned up the 
points of their shoes; when blacking and starch 
were introduced; who among the Anglo-Saxons 
carried the first umbrella, and who borrowed it. 

These trifles, also, acquire importance in propor- 
tion as they are older. If a naturalist showed us a 
toad, we should be indifferent, but if he told us that 
it had been found in a block of granite, we should 
instantly look with profound interest on a creature 
that perhaps ate moths in Abel's garden, or hopped 
out of the path of Lamech. And the same precious 
jewel of instruction we find in the ugly little facts 
embedded in early literatures. They teach us the 
unchangeableness of man and his real independence 

30 



PIERS PLOUGHMAN'S VISION 

of his accidents. He is the same old lay figure 
under all his draperies, and sits to one artist for a 
John and to another for a Judas, and serves equally 
well for both portraits. The oldest fable reappears 
in the newest novel. Aristophanes makes coats that 
fit us still. Voltaire is Lucian translated into the 
eighteenth century. Augustus turns up in Louis 
Napoleon. The whirligig of Time brings back at 
regular intervals the same actors and situations, and 
under whatever names — Ormuzd and Ahriman, 
Protestantism and Catholicism, Eeform and Con- 
servatism, Transcendentalism and Eealism. We 
see the same ancient quarrel renewed from genera- 
tion to generation, till we begin to doubt whether 
this be truly the steps of a Tower of Babel that we 
are mounting, and not rather a treadmill, where we 
get all the positive good of the exercise and none 
of the theoretic ill which might come if we could 
once solve the problem of getting above ourselves. 
Man's life continues to be, as the Saxon noble de- 
scribed it, the flight of a sparrow through a lighted 
hall, out of one darkness and into another, and the 
two questions whence f and tvhither f were no tougher 
to Adam than to us. The author of Piers Plough- 
man's Vision has offered us his theory of this 
world and the next, and in doing so gives some 
curious hints of modes of hfe and of thought. It is 

31 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

generally agreed that one of his names was Lang- 
land, and it is disputed whether the other was 
Robert or William. Eobert has the most author- 
ity, and William the strongest arguments in its 
favor. It is of little consequence now to him or 
us. He was probably a monk at Malvern. His 
poem is a long one, written in the unrhymed 
alliterative measure of the Anglo-Saxon poetry, 
and the plan of it is of the simplest kind. It is a 
continued allegory, in which all the vices, passions, 
and follies of the time, the powers of the mind, the 
qualities of the spirit, and the theological dogmas 
of the author, are personified and mixed up with 
real personages with so much simplicity, and with 
such unconscious interfusion of actual life as to 
give the whole an air of probability. 

The author of Piers Ploughman's Vision avoids 
any appearance of incongruity by laying his scene 
in a world which is neither wholly real nor 
wholly imaginary — the realm of sleep and dreams. 
There it does not astonish us that Langland 
should meet and talk with the theological virtues, 
and that very avoirdupois knights, monks, ab- 
bots, friars, and ploughmen should be found in 
company with such questionable characters as Do- 
well, Do-better, Do-best, Conscience, Nature, Clergy, 
and Activa Vita. He has divided his poem into 
twenty " steps," as he calls them, in each of which 

32 



PIERS PLOUGHMAN'S VISION 

he falls asleep, has a dream, and wakes up when it 
becomes convenient or he is at a loss what else to 
do. Meanwhile his real characters are so very real, 
and his allegorical ones mingle with them on such 
a common ground of easy familiarity, that we for- 
get the allegory altogether. We are not surprised 
to find those Utopian edifices, the Tower of Truth 
and the Church of Unity, in the same street with 
an alehouse as genuine as that of Tam o' Shanter, 
and it would seem nothing out of the common if 
we should see the twelve signs of the Zodiac saving 
themselves from Deucalion's flood in an arc of the 
Ecliptic. 

Mr. Lowell here read long extracts from the 
poem, with a commentary of his own, generally 
brief, of which we can give only the following 
fine passage on Personification. 

The truth is, that ideal personifications are com- 
monly little better than pinchbeck substitutes for 
imagination. They are a refuge which unimagina- 
tive minds seek from their own sterile imaginative- 
ness. They stand in the same relation to poetry as 
wax figures to sculpture. The more nearly they 
counterfeit reality, the more unpleasant they are, 
and there is always a dejected irresponsibleness 
about the legs and a Brattle street air in the boots 
that is ludicrous. The imagination gives us no pic- 
tures, but the thing itself. It goes out for the mo- 



1 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

ment to dwell in and inform with its own life the 
object of its vision — as Keats says somewhere 
in one of his letters, " I hop about the gravel and 
pick up crumbs in the sparrows." And so, in per- 
sonifying, the imagination must have energy to 
project its own emotion so as to see it objectively — 
just as the disease of the hypochondriac runs be- 
fore him in a black dog. Thus it was that the early 
poets, " who believed the wonders that they sang," 
peopled the forests, floods, and mountains with 
real shapes of beauty or terror ; and accordingly in 
primitive times ecstasy is always attributed to the 
condition of the poetic mind. To the great poets 
these ecstasies are still possible, and personification 
had its origin in the tradition of these, and the en- 
deavor of inferior minds to atone for their own 
languor by what we may call historical or remin- 
iscental imagination. Here is indicated the decline 
from faith to ritual. Shakspeare has illustrated 
the true secret of imaginative personification when 
he makes the conscience of Macbeth become ex- 
ternal and visible to him in the ghastly shape at 
the banquet which he alone can see, and Lady Mac- 
beth's afterwards in the blood-stain on her hand. 
This is the personification of the creative mind 
whose thoughts are not images, but things. And 
this seems to have been the normal condition of 
Shakspeare's genius, as it is the exceptional one of 

34 



PIERS PLOUGHMAN'S VISION 

all other poets. He alone has embodied in flesh and 
blood his every thought and fancy and emotion, 
his every passion and temptation. Beside him all 
other poets seem but the painters and not the 
makers of men. He sent out his profound intellect 
to look at life from every point of view, and through 
the eyes of all men and women from the highest to 
the lowest. In every one he seems to have tapped 
it with the knuckles, to have said sadly, Tinnit^ inane 
est, It rings, it is hollow; and then to have gone 
down quietly to wait for death and another world 
at Stratford. 

As fine an example as any of the prose imagina- 
tion, of the intellect acting pictorially, is where 
Hobbes compares the Papacy to the ghost of the 
Roman Empire sitting upon its tomb. This implies 
a foregone personification, but the pleasure it gives 
springs chiefly from our sense of its historic and 
intellectual truth. And this subordinate form of 
imagination uses typically and metaphorically those 
forms in which ecstasy had formerly visibly clothed 
itself, flesh-and-blooded itself, so to speak ; as where 
Lord Bacon says that Persecution in the name of 
Eeligion is "to bring down the Holy Ghost, not in 
the likeness of a dove, but in the shape of a vulture 
or a raven." 

After reading more extracts from the poem, Mr. 
Lowell concluded his lecture in these words : 

35 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

Truly it seems to me that I can feel a heart beat 
all through this old poem, a manly, trustful, and 
tender one. There are some men who have what 
may be called a vindictive love of Truth — whose 
love of it, indeed, seems to be only another form of 
hatred to their neighbor. They put crooked pins 
on the stool of repentance before they invite the 
erring to sit down on it. Our brother Langland is 
plainly not one of these. 

What I especially find to our purpose in Piers 
Ploughman, as I said before, is that it defines 
with tolerable exactness those impulses which our 
poetry has received from the Anglo-Saxon as 
distinguished from the Anglo-Norman element of 
our race. It is a common Yankee proverb that 
there is a great deal of human nature in man. I 
think it especially true of the Anglo-Saxon man. 
We find in this poem common sense, tenderness, a 
love of spiritual goodness without much sensibility 
to the merely beautiful, a kind of domestic feeling 
of nature and a respect for what is established. But 
what is still more noticeable is that man is recog- 
nized as man, and that the conservatism of Lang- 
land is predicated upon the well-being of the people. 

It is impossible to revive a dead j)oem, but it is 
pleasant, at least, to throw a memorial flower upon 
its grave. 

36 



LECTUEE III 

THE METRICAL ROMANCES 

{Tuesday Evening, January 16, 1855) 



3* 



Ill 



WHERE is the Golden Age? It is fifty years 
ago to every man and woman of three-score 
and ten. I do not doubt that aged Adam babbled of 
the superiority of the good old times, and, forgetful 
in his enthusiasm of that fatal bite which set the 
teeth of all his descendants on edge, told, with a re- 
gretful sigh, how much larger and finer the apples of 
his youth were than that to which the great-grand- 
son on his knee was giving a preliminary polish. 
Meanwhile the great-grandson sees the good times 
far in front, a galaxy of golden pippins whereof he 
shall pluck and eat as many as he likes without 
question. Thus it is that none of us knows when 
Time is with him, but the old man sees only his 
shoulders and that inexorable wallet in which youth 
and beauty and strength are borne away as alms for 
Oblivion; and the boy beholds but the glowing face 
and the hands stretched out full of gifts like those 
of a St. Nicholas. Thus there is never any present 
good ; but the juggler. Life, smilingly baffles us all, 
making us believe that the vanished ring is under 

39 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

his left hand or his right, the past or the future, 
and shows us at last that it was in our own pocket 
all the while. 

So we may always listen with composure when 
we hear of Golden Ages passed away. Burke pro- 
nounced the funeral oration of one — of the age of 
Chivalry — the period of Metrical Romances — of 
which I propose to speak to-night. Mr. Ruskin — 
himself as true a knight-errant as ever sat in a 
demipique saddle, ready to break a lance with all 
comers, and resolved that even the windmills and 
the drovers shall not go about their business till 
they have done homage to his Dulcinea — for the 
time being joins in the lament. Nay, what do 
we learn from the old romances themselves, but 
that all the heroes were already dead and buried I 
Their song also is a threnody, if we listen rightly. 
For when did Oliver and Roland live? When 
Arthur and Tristem and Lancelot and Caradoc 
Break-arm? In that Golden Age of Chivalry 
which is always past. 

Undoubtedly there was a great deal in the insti- 
tution of Chivalry that was picturesque; but it is 
noticeable in countries where society is still pictur- 
esque that dirt and ignorance and tyranny have the 
chief hand in making them so. Mr. Fenimore 
Cooper thought the American savage picturesque, 

40 



THE METRICAL ROMANCES 

but if he had lived in a time when it was neces- 
sary that one should take out a policy of insurance 
on his scalp or wig before going to bed, he might 
have seen them in a different light. The tourist 
looks up with delight at the eagle sliding in smooth- 
winged circles on the icy mountain air, and spark- 
ling back the low morning sun like a belated star. 
But what does the lamb think of him f Let us 
look at Chivalry a moment from the lamb's point 
of view. 

It is true that the investiture of the Knight was 
a religious ceremony, but this was due to the 
Church, which in an age of brute force always 
maintained the traditions at least of the intellect 
and conscience. The vows which the Knights took 
had as little force as those of god-parents, who fulfil 
their spiritual relation by sending a piece of plate 
to the god-child. They stood by each other when 
it was for their interest to do so, but the only virtue 
they had any respect for was an arm stronger than 
their own. It is hard to say which they preferred 
to break — a head, or one of the Ten Command- 
ments. They looked upon the rich Jew with thirty- 
two sound teeth in his head as a providential con- 
trivance, and practised upon him a comprehensive 
kind of dental surgery, at once for profit and 
amusement, and then put into some chapel a 

41 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

painted window with a Jewish prophet in it for piety 
— as if tliey were the Jewish profits they cared 
about. They outraged and robbed their vassals in 
every conceivable manner, and, if very religious, 
made restitution on their death-beds by giving a 
part of the plunder (when they could keep it no 
longer) to have masses sung for the health of their 
souls — thus contriving, as they thought, to be their 
own heirs in the other world. Individual examples 
of heroism are not wanting to show that man is al- 
ways paramount to the institutions of his own con- 
triving, so that any institution will yield itself to 
the compelling charms of a noble nature. But even 
were this not so, yet Sir Philip Sidney, the stand- 
ard type of the chivalrous, grew up under other in- 
fluences. So did Lord Herbert of Cherbury, so did 
the incomparable Bayard ; and the single fact that 
is related as a wonderful thing of Bayard, that, after 
the storming of Brescia, he respected the honor of 
the daughter of a lady in whose house he was quar- 
tered, notwithstanding she was beautiful and in his 
power, is of more weight than all the romances in 
Don Quixote's library. 

But what form is that which rises before us, with 
features in which the gentle and forgiving reproach 
of the woman is lost in the aspiring power of the 
martyr ? 

42 



THE METRICAL ROMANCES 
We know lier as she was, 

The whitest hly in the shiehl of France, 
With heart of virgin gold, 

that bravest and most loyal heart over whose beat- 
ings knightly armor was ever buckled, that saintly 
shape in which even battle looks lovely, that life so 
pnre, so inspired, so humble, which stands there 
forever to show us how near womanhood ever is to 
heroism, and that the human heart is true to an eter- 
nal instinct when it paints Faith and Hope and Char- 
ity and Religion with the countenances of women. 

We are told that the sentiment of respect for 
woman, a sentiment always remarkable in the Teu- 
tonic race, is an inheritance from the Institution of 
Chivalry. But womanhood must be dressed in silk 
and miniver that chivalry may recognize it. That 
priceless pearl hidden in the coarse kirtle of the 
peasant-girl of Domremy it trampled under its 
knightly feet — shall I say? — or swinish hoofs. 
Poor Joan! The chivalry of France sold her; the 
chivalry of England subjected her to outrages 
whose burning shame cooled the martyr-fire, and 
the King whom she had saved, the very top of 
French Knighthood, was toying with Agnes Sorel 
while the fagots were crackling around the savior 
of himself and his kingdom in the square of Eouen ! 

43 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

Thank Grod, that our unchivakic generation can 
hack the golden spurs from such recreant heels ! 
A statue stands now where her ashes were gathered 
to be cast into the Seine, but her fittest monument 
is the little fountain beneath it, the emblem of 
her innocence, of her inspiration, drawn not from 
court, or castle, or cloister, but from the inscru- 
table depths of that old human nature and that 
heaven common to us all — an emblem, no less, 
that the memory of a devoted life is a spring where 
all coming times may drink the holy waters of 
gratitude and aspiration. I confess that I cannot 
see clearly that later scaffold in the Place de la 
Revolution, through the smoke of this martyr-fire 
at Rouen, but it seems to me that, compared with 
this woman, the Marie Antoinette, for whose sake 
Burke lamented the downfall of chivalry, is only 
the daughter of a king. 

But those old days, whether good or bad, have 
left behind them a great body of literature, of which 
even yet a large part remains unprinted. To this 
literature belong the Metrical Romances. As- 
tonished by the fancy and invention so abundantly 
displayed by the writers of these poems, those who 
have written upon the subject have set themselves 
gravely to work to find out what country they could 
have got them from. Mr. Warton, following Dr. 

44 






THE METRICAL ROMANCES 

Warburton, inclines to assign them to an Oriental 
origin. Dr. Percy, on the other hand, asserts a 
Scandinavian origin; while Ritson, who would have 
fonnd it reason enough to think that the sun rose 
in the West if Warton or Percy had taken the other 
side, is positive that they were wholly French. 
Perhaps the truth lies somewhere between the posi- 
tions of Percy and Ritson. The Norman race, 
neither French nor Scandinavian, was a product of 
the mingled blood of both, and in its mental char- 
acteristics we find the gaiety and lively fancy of 
the one tempering what is wild in the energy and 
gloomy in the imagination of the other. 

We know the exact date of the arrival of the 
first Metrical Romance in England. Taillefer, a 
Norman minstrel, brought it over in his head, and 
rode in the front at the battle of Hastings singing 
the song of Roland. Taillefer answers precisely 
the description of a Danish skald, but he sang in 
French, and the hero he celebrated was one of the 
peers of Charlemagne, who was himself a Grerman. 

Taillefer, who well could sing a strain, 
Upon a swift horse rode amain 
Before the Duke and chanted loud 
Of Charlemagne and Roland good, 
Of Oliver and vassals brave 
Who found at Roncesvalles their grave. 

45 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

What this song of Eoland was it is impossible 
to say, as the only copy of it seems to have per- 
ished with Taillefer at the battle of Hastings; but 
it was probably of the same kind with many of 
those which have survived and brought down to 
us the exploits of Arthur and his knights. 

With regard to a large part of the romances of 
the Round Table, and those which grew out of 
them, it is tolerably certain that, although written 
in French, they were made in England. 

One of the great charms of the Metrical Romances 
is the innocent simplicity with which they commit 
anachronisms. Perhaps it would be more exact to 
call them synchronisms, for, with the most undoubt- 
ing faith, they compel all other times to adopt the 
dress, manners, and conventionalities of their own. 
To them there was no one world, nor ever had been 
any, except that of Romance. They conferred re- 
trospective knighthood upon the patriarchs ; upon 
Job, David, and Solomon. Joseph of Arimathea 
became Sir Joseph of that ilk. Even the soldier 
who pierced the side of Jesus upon the cross was 
made into Sir Longinus and represented as running 
a tilt with our Lord. All the heroes of the Grecian 
legend were treated in the same way. They trans- 
lated the old time and the old faith into new, and 
thus completed the outfit of their own imaginary 

46 



THE METRICAL ROMANCES 

world, supplying it at a very cheap rate with a Past 
and with mythology. And as they believed the 
gods and genii of the Pagan ancients to have been 
evil spirits who, though undeified, were imperish- 
able in their essence, they were allowed to emigrate 
in a body from the old religion into the new, where 
they continued to exercise their functions, some- 
times under their former names, but oftener in some 
disguise. These unfortunate aliens seem to have 
lived very much from hand to mouth, and after the 
invention of holy water (more terrible to them than 
G-reek-fire) they must have had rather an uncom- 
fortable time of it. The giants were received with 
enthusiasm, and admitted to rights of citizenship 
in the land of Romance, where they were allowed 
to hold fiefs and castles in consideration of their 
eminent usefulness in abducting damsels, and their 
serving as anvils to the knights, who sometimes be- 
labored them for three days at a time, the fight end- 
ing at last, not from failure of breath on the part 
of the combatants but of the minstrel. As soon as 
he has enough, or sees that his hearers have, the head 
of the unhappy giant becomes loose on his shoulders. 
Another charm of the romances is their entire 
inconsequentiality. As soon as we enter this won- 
derful country the old fetters of cause and effect 
drop from our limbs, and we are no longer bound 

47 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

to give a reason for anything. All things come to 
pass in that most charming of ways which children 
explain by the comprehensive metaphysical for- 
mula — " ^cause.^^ Nothing seems to be premeditated, 
but a knight falls in love, or out of it, fights, goes 
on board enchanted vessels that carry him to coun- 
tries laid down on no chart, and all without asking 
a question. In truth, it is a delightful kind of im- 
promptu life, such as we all should like to lead if we 
could, with nothing set down in the bills beforehand. 

But the most singular peculiarity of Romance- 
land remains to be noticed — there are no people in 
it, that is, no common people. The lowest rank in 
life is that of a dwarf. It is true that if a knight 
loses his way there will always be a clown or two 
to set him right. But they disappear at once, and 
seem to be wholly phantasmagoric, or, at best, an ex- 
pedient rendered necessary by the absence of guide- 
posts, and the inability of the cavaliers to read them 
if there had been any. There are plenty of Sara- 
cens no doubt, but they are more like cucumbers 
than men, and are introduced merely that the knight 
may have the pleasure of slicing them. 

We cannot claim any condensed poetical merit 
for the Metrical Romances. They have very few 
quotable passages and fewer vigorous single lines. 
Their merit consists in a diffuse picturesqueness, and 

48 



THE METRICAL ROMANCES 

reading them is like turning over illuminated mis- 
sals in a traveler's half-hour, which leave a vague 
impression on the mind of something vivid and 
fanciful, without one's being able to recall any par- 
ticular beauty. Some of them have great narrative 
merit, being straightforward and to the purpose, 
never entangling themselves in reflection or sub- 
ordinating the story to the expression. In this re- 
spect they are refreshing after reading many poems 
of the modern school, which, under the pretense of 
sensuousness, are truly sensual, and deal quite as 
much with the upholstery as with the soul of poetry. 
The thought has nowadays become of less impor- 
tance than the vehicle of it, and amid the pomp of 
words we are too often reminded of an Egyptian 
procession, in which all the painful musical instru- 
ments then invented, priests, soldiers, and royalty 
itself, accompany the triumphal chariot containing 
perhaps, after all, only an embalmed monkey or a 
pickled ibis. 

There is none of this nonsense in the Old Ro- 
mances, though sometimes they are tediously senti- 
mental, and we wonder as much at the capacity of 
our ancestors in bearing dry verses as dry blows. 
Generally, however, they show an unaffected piety 
and love of nature. The delight of the old minstrels 
in the return of Spring is particularly agreeable, 

4 49 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

and another argument in favor of the Northern 
origin of this class of poems. Many of them open 
with passages like this : 

Merry it is in the month of May, 

When the small fowls sing their lay, 

Then flowers the apple-tree and perr}^, 

And the little birds sing merry ; 

Then the ladies strew their bowers 

With red roses and lily flowers, 

The damisels lead down the dance, 

And the knights play with shield and lance. 

Some of the comparisons, also, drawn from Na- 
ture, are as fresh as dew. For example, when a 
lady sees her lover : 

She is as glad at that sight 
As the birds are of the light. 

Or, 

As glad as grass is of the rain. 

A knight is said to be 

As weary as water in a weir, 
a simile full of imagination. 

50 



THE METRICAL ROMANCES 

The most airy glimpses of the picturesque occur 
sometimes ; as describing a troop of knights : 

They rode away full serriedly, 
Their gilded pennons of silk of Ind 
Merrily rattled with the wind ; 
The steeds so noble and so wight 
Leaped and neighed beneath each knight. 

After quoting various specimens of these poems, 
Mr. Lowell gave the following sketch of the man- 
ners and customs of Romance-land, "condensed 
from the best authorities." 

If you are born in this remarkable country and 
destined for a hero, the chances are that by the 
time you are seven years old your father will have 
gone off to fight the infidels, and a neighboring 
earl will have taken possession of his estates and 
his too-hastily-supposed widow. You resent this 
in various ways, especially by calling your step- 
father all the proper names you can think of that 
are improper. He, for some unexplained reason, is 
unable to get rid of you, though he tries a variety 
of plots level with the meanest capacity. You, be- 
ing of uncommon sagacity, are saved by the aid of 
three or four superfluous miracles. Meanwhile you 
contrive to pick up a good knightly education, and 
by the time you are seventeen are bigger and 

51 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

stronger and handsomer than anybody else, ex- 
cept, of course, the giants. So, one day you buckle 
on your armor, mount your horse, who is as re- 
markable in his way as yourself, and go adventur- 
ing. Presently you come to a castle where you 
are most courteously received. Maidens as white 
as whale's bone and fair as flowers (they are all so 
in Eomance-land) help you off with your armor, 
and dress you in richest silks. You then go to 
dine with the Lord of the Castle, who is a knight 
of very affable manners and agreeable conversa- 
tion, but with an aversion to religious topics. His 
daughter, the fairest lady on the ground, assists at 
the meal. You are conducted to your chamber, 
and after a refreshing sleep meet your host and 
hostess at breakfast. At a suitable time you re- 
turn thanks for your kind treatment and ask for 
your horse. The knight, however, in the blandest 
manner tells you that a little custom of his will in- 
terfere with your departure. He is in the habit of 
fighting with all his guests, and has hitherto been 
successful in killing them all to the number of 
several hundred. This is precisely the account 
which you are fond of settling, and after a few 
allusions to Mahomed and Termagant and Alcoban, 
you accept the challenge and, of course, come off 
victor. This seems to settle the matter for the 

52 



THE METRICAL ROMANCES 

young lady whom your lance has just promoted to 
her inheritance, and she immediately offers herself 
and her estates to you, telling you, at the same 
time, that she had long been secretly a Christian. 
Though madly in love with her, and interested in 
her religious views, which she details to you at 
some length, you mount your steed and ride away, 
but without being expected to give any reasons. 
You have a particular mission nowhere, and on 
your way to that interesting country you kill a 
megalosaiirus (for whose skeleton Professor Owen 
would have given his ears), and two or three inci- 
dental giants. Riding on, you come to a Paynim- 
land, ruled over by a liberally-minded Soldan, who 
receives you into favor after you have slain some 
thousands of his subjects to get an appetite for 
dinner. The Soldan, of course, has a daughter, 
who is converted by you, and, of course, offers you 
her hand. This makes you think of the other lady, 
and you diplomatize. But there is another Paynim- 
land, and another Soldan, who sends word that he 
intends to marry your beautiful convert. 

The embassy of the proud Paynim somehow re- 
sults in your being imprisoned for seven years, 
when it suddenly occurs to you that you might 
as well step out. So you pick up a magic sword 
that has been shut up with you, knock down the 

4* 53 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

jailers, mount your horse which is waiting at the 
door, and ride off. Now, or at some other conven- 
ient time, you take occasion to go mad for a year 
or two on account of ladye-love number one. But 
hearing that ladye-love number two is about to 
yield to the addresses of her royal suitor, who has 
killed her father, burned his capital, and put all his 
subjects to the sword, you make some appropriate 
theological disquisitions and start to the rescue. 
On your way you meet a strange knight, join com- 
bat with him without any questions on either side, 
and after a doubtful fight of a day or two, are mutu- 
ally overcome with amazement at finding anybody 
who cannot be beaten. Of course it turns out that 
the strange knight is your father ; you join forces, 
make short work with the amorous Soldan and his 
giants, and find yourself encumbered with a young 
lady, a princess too, all of whose relatives and vas- 
sals have been slaughtered on your account, and 
who naturally expects you to share her throne. In 
a moment of abstraction you consent to the ar- 
rangement, and are married by an archbishop in 
partihiis who happens to be on the spot. As your 
late royal rival has slain all your late father-in-law's 
lieges, and you have done the same service for him 
in turn, there are no adventures left in this part 
of the world. Luckily, before the wedding-ring is 

54 



THE METRICAL ROMANCES 

warm on your finger, a plesiosaurus turns up. This 
saves many disagreeable explanations with the 
bride, whom you are resolved to have nothing to 
do with while the other young lady is alive. You 
settle her comfortably on the throne of her depopu- 
lated kingdom, slay the monster, and start for home 
with your revered parent. There you overcome 
the usurping Earl, reinstate your father, and assist 
cheerfully at the burning of your mother for big- 
amy; your filial piety being less strong than your 
reverence for the laws of your country. A fairy 
who has a particular interest in you (and who, it 
seems, is your real mother, after all — a fact which 
relieves your mind of any regrets on the score of 
the late melancholy bonfire), lets you into the secret 
that ladye-love the first is your own sister. This 
revives your affection for your wife, and you go 
back to the kingdom of Grombraunt, find her re- 
duced to extremities by another matrimonial Sol- 
dan, whom you incontinently massacre with all Jus 
giants, and now at last a prospect of quiet domestic 
life seems to open. Dull, peaceful days follow, and 
you begin to take desponding views of life, when 
your ennui is pleasantly broken in upon by a mon- 
ster who combines in himself all the monstrosities 
of heraldic zoology. You decapitate him and in- 
cautiously put one of his teeth in your boot as a 

55 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

keepsake. A scratch ensues, physicians are in vain, 
and you die with an edifying piety, deeply regretted 
by your subjects, if there are any left with their 
heads on. 

On the whole, we may think ourselves happy that 
we live under somewhat different institutions. 



56 



/ 



LECTURE IV 

THE BALLADS 

(Friday Evening^ January 19, 1855) 



IV 



ONE of the laws of the historical Macbeth de- 
clares that " Fools, minstrels, bards, and all 
other such idle people, unless they be specially 
licensed by the King, shall be compelled to seek 
some craft to win their living," and the old chron- 
icler adds approvingly, " These and such-like laws 
were used by King Macbeth, through which he 
governed the realm ten years in good justice." 

I do not quote this in order to blacken the mem- 
ory of that unhappy monarch. The poets com- 
monly contrive to be even with their enemies in 
the end, and Shakspeare has taken an ample re- 
venge. I cite it only for the phrase unless they he 
specially licensed by the King, which points to a 
fact on which I propose to dwell for a few mo- 
ments before entering upon my more immediate 
object. 

When Virgil said, " Arma virumque cano," " Arms 
and the man I sing," he defined in the strictest man- 
ner the original office of the poet, and the object of 
the judicious Macbeth's ordinance was to prevent 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

any one from singing the wrong arms and the rival 
man. Formerly the poet held a recognized place 
in the body politic, and if he has been deposed 
from it, it may be some consolation to think that 
the Fools^ whom the Scottish usurper included in 
his penal statute, have not lost their share in the 
government of the world yet, nor, if we may trust 
appearances, are likely to for some time to come. 
But the Fools here referred to were not those who 
had least, but those who had most wit, and who 
assumed that disguise in order to take away any 
dangerous appearance of intention from their jibes 
and satires. 

The poet was once what the political newspaper 
is now, and circulated from ear to ear with satire 
or panegyric. He it was who first made public 
opinion a power in the State by condensing it 
into a song. The invention of printing, by weak- 
ening the faculty of memory, and by transferring 
the address of language from the ear to the eye, 
has lessened the immediate power of the poet. A 
newspaper may be suppressed, an editor may be 
silenced, every copy of an obnoxious book may be 
destroyed, but in those old days when the minstrels 
were a power, a verse could wander safely from 
heart to heart and from hamlet to hamlet as unas- 
sailable as the memories on which it was imprinted. 

60 






THE BALLADS 

Its force was in its impersoDality, for public opinion 
is disenchanted the moment it is individualized, and 
is terrible only so long as it is the opinion of no one 
in particular. Find its author, and the huge shadow 
which but now darkened half the heaven shrinks 
like the genius of the Arabian story into the com- 
pass of a leaden casket which one can hold in his 
hand. Nowadays one knows the editor, perhaps, 
and so is on friendly terms with public opinion. 
You may have dined with it yesterday, rubbed 
shoulders with it in the omnibus to-day, nay, car- 
ried it in your pocket embodied in the letter of the 
special correspondent. 

Spenser, in his prose tract upon Ireland, has left 
perhaps the best description possible of the primi- 
tive poet as he was everywhere when the copies of 
a poem were so many living men, and all publica- 
tion was to the accompaniment of music. He says : 
^' There is amongst the Irish a certain kind of 
people called bards, which are to them instead of 
poets, whose profession is to set forth the praises 
or dispraises of men in their poems or rhythms; 
the which are held in such high regard or esteem 
amongst them that none dare to displease them for 
fear of running into reproach through this offense, 
and to be made infamous in the mouths of all men.'' 

Nor was the sphere of the bards confined to the 

61 



^ 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

present alone. They were also the embodied mem- 
ory of the people. It was on the wings of verse that 
the names of ancestral heroes could float down se- 
curely over broad tracts of desert time and across 
the gulfs of oblivion. And poets were sometimes 
made use of by sagacious rulers to make legends 
serve a political purpose. The Persian poet Firdusi 
is a remarkable instance of this. Virgil also at- 
tempted to braid together the raveled ends of Ro- 
man and Greek tradition, and it is not impossible 
that the minstrels of the Norman metrical romances 
were guided by a similar instinct. 

But the position of the inhabitants of England 
was a peculiar one. The Saxons by their conver- 
sion to Christianity, and the Normans still more by 
their conversion and change of language, were al- 
most wholly cut off from the past. The few frag- 
ments of the Celtic race were the only natives of 
Britain who had an antiquity. The English properly 
so called were a people who hardly knew their own 
grandfathers. They no longer spoke the language, 
believed in the religion, or were dominated by the 
ideas of their ancestors. 

English writers demand of us a national litera- 
ture. But where for thirteen centuries was their 
own ! Our ancestors brought a past with them to 
Plymouth ; they claimed descent from a great race ; 

62 



THE BALLADS 

the language they spoke had been ennobled by re- 
cording the triumphs of ancestral daring and genius; 
it had gone up to Heaven wafted on the red wings 
of martyr-fires; mothers hushed their new-born 
babes, and priests scattered the farewell earth upon 
the coffin-lid, with words made sweet or sacred by 
immemorial association. But the Normans when 
they landed in England were a new race of armed 
men almost as much cut off from the influences of 
the past as those which sprang out of the ground 
at the sowing of the dragon's teeth. They found 
there a Saxon encampment occupying a country 
strange to them also. For w^e must remember 
that though Britain was historically old, Eng- 
land was not ; and it was as impossible to piece the 
histories of the two together to make a national 
record of as it would be for us to persuade our- 
selves into a feeling of continental antiquity by 
adopting the Mexican annals. 

The ballads are the first truly national poetry in 
our language, and national poetry is not either that 
of the drawing-room or of the kitchen. It is the 
common mother-earth of the universal sentiment 
that the foot of the poet must touch, through 
which shall steal up to heart and brain that fine 
virtue which puts him in sympathy, not with his 
class, but with his kind. 

63 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

Fortunately for the ballad-makers, they were not 
encumbered with any useless information. They 
had not wit enough to lose their way. It is only 
the greatest brains and the most intense imagina- 
tion that can fuse learning into one substance with 
their own thought and feeling, and so interpene- 
trate it with themselves that the acquired is as much 
they as the native. The ballad-makers had not far 
to seek for material. The shipwreck, the runaway 
match, the unhappy marriage, the village ghost, the 
achievement of the border outlaw — in short, what 
we read every day under the head of Items in the 
newspapers, were the inspiration of their song. 
And they sang well, because they thought, and felt, 
and believed just as their hearers did, and because 
they never thought anything about it. The ballads 
are pathetic because the poet did not try to make 
them so; and they are models of nervous and simple 
diction because the business of the poet was to tell 
his story, and not to adorn it ; and accordingly he 
went earnestly and straightforwardly to work, and 
let the rapid thought snatch the word as it ran, 
feeling quite sure of its getting the right one. The 
only art of expression is to have something to ex- 
press. We feel as wide a difference between what 
is manufactured and what is spontaneous as be- 
tween the sparkles of an electrical machine, which 

64 



THE BALLADS 

a sufficiently muscular professor can grind out by 
tlie dozen, and the wildfire of God that writes 
mene^ mene, on the crumbling palace walls of mid- 
night cloud. 

It seems to me that the ballad-maker, in respect 
of diction, had also this advantage — that he had no 
books. Language, when it speaks to the eye only, 
loses half its meaning. For the eye is an outpost 
of the brain, and wears its livery oftener than that 
of the character. But the temperament, the deep 
human nature, the aboriginal emotions, these utter 
themselves in the voice. It is only by the ear that 
the true mother-tongue that knows the short way 
to the heart is learned. I do not believe that a man 
born deaf could understand Shakspeare, or sound 
anything but the edges and shores of Lear's tem- 
pestuous woe. I think that the great masters of 
speech have hunted men and not libraries, and 
have found the secret of their power in the street 
and not upon the shelf. 

It is the ivaij of saying things that is learned by 
commerce with men, and the best writers have 
mixed much with the world. It is there only that 
the language of feeling can be acquired. 

The ballads are models of narrative poetry. 
They are not concerned with the utterance of 
thought, but only of sentiment or passion, and it is 

5 65 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

as illustrating poetic diction that I shall chiefly cite 
them. If they moralize it is always by picture, and 
not by preachment. What discourse of inconstancy 
has the force and biting pathos of this grim old 
song, the " Twa Corbies " ? 

As I was walking all alone 

I heard twa corbies making a moan. 

The one unto the other did say : 

Where shall we gang and dine to-day ! 

In beyond that old turf dyke 

I wot there lies a new-slain knight, 

And naebody kens that he lies there, 

But his hawk and his hound and his lady fair. 

His hound is to the hunting gone, 

His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame, 

His lady 's ta'en anither mate — 

Sae we may make our dinner sweet. 

You '11 sit upon his white neck-bone 

And I '11 pick out his bonny blue een ; 

With a lock of his golden hair 

We '11 thatch our nest when it grows bare. 

Many a one for him makes moan, 

But none sail ken where he is gone ; 

O'er his white bones when they grow bare 

The wind shall blow forever mair. 

Observe, the wind simply blows. That is enough; 
but a modern poet would have sought to intensify 

66 



THE BALLADS 

by making the wind moan, or shriek, or sob, or 
something of the kind. 

Mr. Lowell here quoted a ballad which tells a 
story of a child-murder. It begins : 

Fair Anne sate in her bower 

Down by the greenwood side, 
And the flowers did spring, 
And the birds did sing, 

'T was the pleasant Mayday tide. 

The ballad singers had all the advantage of that 
spur of the moment which the excitement of speak- 
ing gives, and they also received the magnetism 
which came from the sympathy of their hearers. 
They knew what tolcl^ for they had their hand upon 
the living pulse of feeling. There was no time to 
palaver; they must come to the point. 

The Percy came out of Northumberland, 

And a vow to God made he 
That he would hunt in the mountains 

Of Cheviot within days three, 
In the maugre of Doughty Douglas 

And all that ever with him be. 

They plunge into deep water at once. And there 
is never any filling up. The transitions are abrupt. 
You can no more foretell the swift wheel of the 

67 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

feeling than that of a falcon, and the phrases flash 
forth sharp-edged and deadly like a sword drawn 
in wrath. The passions speak out savagely and 
without any delicacies of circumlocution. 

It is worth thinking of whether the press, which 
we have a habit of calling such a fine institution, 
be not weakening the fibre and damaging the sin- 
cerity of our English and our thinking, quite as 
fast as it diffuses intelligence. 

Consider the meaning of expression — something 
wrung from us by the grip of thought or passion, 
whether we will or no. But the editor is quite as 
often compelled to write that he may fill an empty 
column as that he may relieve an overfilled brain. 
And in a country like ours, where newspapers are 
the only reading of the mass of the people, there is a 
danger of a general contentedness in commonplace. 
For we always become what we habitually read. 
We let our newspapers think for us, argue for us, 
criticize for us, remember for us, do everything for 
us, in short, that will save us from the misfortune of 
being ourselves. And so, instead of men and women, 
we find ourselves in a world inhabited by incar- 
nated leaders, or paragraphs, or items of this or 
that journal. We are apt to wonder at the scholar- 
ship of the men of two centuries ago. They were 
scholars because they did not read so much as we 

68 



THE BALLADS 

do. We spend more time over print than they did, 
but instead of communing with the choice thought 
of choice spirits, and insensibly acquiring the grand 
manner of that supreme society, we diUgently in- 
form ourselves of such facts as that a fine horse 
belonging to Mr. Smith ran away on Wednesday 
and that a son of Mr. Brown fell into the canal on 
Thursday, or that a gravel bank fell in and buried 
Patrick O'Callahan on Friday. And it is our own 
fault, and not that of the editor. For we make the 
newspapers, and the editor would be glad to give us 
better stuff if we did not demand such as this. 

Another evil of this state of things is the water- 
ing, or milk-and-watering, of our English. Writing 
to which there is no higher compelling destiny than 
the coming of the printer's devil must end in this 
at last. The paragraphist must make his paragraph, 
and the longer he makes it, the better for him and 
the worse for us. The virtue of words becomes 
wholly a matter of length. Accordingly, we have 
now no longer any fires, but " disastrous conflagra- 
tions"; nobody dies, but "deceases" or "demises"; 
men do not fall from houses, but are " precipitated 
from mansions or edifices "; a convict is not hanged, 
but "suffers the extreme penalty of the offended 
law," etc. 

The old ballad-makers lived in a better day. 

5* 69 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

They did not hear of so many events that none of 
them made any impression. They did not live, as 
we do, in a world that seems a great ear of Diony- 
sius, where if a scandal is whispered in Pekin we 
hear of it in New York. The minstrels had no 
metaphysical bees in their bonnets. They did not 
speculate about this world or the next. They had 
not made the great modern discovery that a bird in 
a bush is worth two in the hand. They did not 
analyze and refine till nothing genuine was left of 
this beautiful world but an indigestion. 

The ballads neither harangue nor describe ; but 
only state things in the least complex way. Those 
old singers caught language fresh and with a flavor 
of the soil in it still, and their hearers were people 
of healthy sensibilities who must be hit directly 
and hard. Accordingly, there is a very vigorous 
handling. They speak bluntly and to the purpose. 
If a maiden loses her lover, she merely 

Turns her face nuto the wall 
And there her heart it breaks. 

A modern poet would have hardly thrown away 
the opportunity offered him for describing the 
chamber and its furniture; he would put a painted 
window into it — for the inkstand will supply them 

70 



THE BALLADS 

quite as cheaply as plain glass. He would tell you 
all about the tapestry which the eyes of the dying- 
maiden in her extreme agony would have been 
likely, of course, to have been minutely interested 
in. He would have given a clinical lecture on the 
symptoms, and a post-mortem examination. It 
was so lucky for those old ballad-mongers that they 
had not any ideas ! And when they give a dying 
speech they do not make their heroes take leave of 
the universe in general as if that were going into 
mourning for a death more or less. 

When Earl Douglas is in his death-thraw, he 
says to his nephew: 

My wound is deep ; I fain would sleep ; 

Take tliou the vanguard of the three. 
And hide me by the brakenbush 

That grows on yonder lily lee. 
O bury me by the brakenbush 

Beneath the blooming brere. 
Let never living mortal ken 

That a kindly Scot lies here. 

The ballads are the only true folk-songs that we 
have in English. There is no other poetry in the 
language that addresses us so simply as mere men 
and women. Learning has tempered with modern 

71 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

poetry, and the Muse, like Portia, wears a doctor's 
cap and gown. 

The force and earnestness of style that mark the 
old ballad become very striking when contrasted 
with later attempts in the same way. It is not 
flatness and insipidity that they are remarkable 
for, but for a bare rocky grandeur in whose crevices 
tenderness nestles its chance tufts of ferns and 
harebells. One of these sincere old verses imbedded 
in the insij)idities of a modern imitation looks out 
stern and colossal as that charcoal head which 
Michael Angelo drew on the wall of the Farnesina 
glowers through the paling frescoes. 

Mr. Lowell here read a number of passages from 
the old ballad entitled "Margaret's Grhost," and 
compared them with a few stanzas from an ''im- 
proved " version of the same by Mallet. He also 
read from the ballad of ''Helen of Kirkconnell," and 
from others. 

Of the tenderness of the ballads I must give an 
instance or two before I leave them. In the old 
ballad of "Clerk Saunders," Margaret follows the 
ghost of her lover to his grave. 

So painfully she climbed the wall, 
She climbed the wall up after him, 

Hose nor shoon upon her feet, 
She had no time to put them on. 

72 



THE BALLADS 

bonny, bonny, sang the bird 

Sat on a coil o' hay, 
But mournfu', mournfu', was the maid 

That followed the corpse o' clay. 

Is there any room at your head, Saunders ? 

Or any room at your feet ? 
Is there any room at your side, Saunders ? 

For fain, fain I would sleep. 

She 's sat her down upon the grave 
And mourned sae lang and sair 

That the clochs and wanton flies at last 
Came and built in her yellow hair. 

In further illustration Mr. Lowell read from the 
"Clerk's Two Sons of Oxenford." He concluded his 
lecture thus: 

I think that the makers of the old ballads did 
stand face to face with life in a way that is getting 
more and more impossible for us. Day by day the 
art of printing isolates us more and more from our 
fellows and from the healthy and inspiring touch 
of our fellows. We continually learn more and 
more of mankind and less of man. We know more 
of Europe than of our own village. We feel hu- 
manity from afar. 

But I must not forget that the ballads have 

73 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

passed through a sieve which no modern author 
has the advantage of. Only those have come down 
to us which imprinted themselves on the general 
heart. The new editions were struck off by mothers 
crooning their children to sleep, or by wandering 
minstrels who went about sowing the seeds of 
courtesy and valor in the cottage and on the hill- 
side. Print, which, like the amber, preserves all an 
author's grubs, gives men the chance to try him by 
the average, rather than the best, of his yield. 

Moreover, the Review of the ballad-singer was in 
the faces of his ring of hearers, in whose glow or 
chill he could read at a glance a criticism from 
which there was no appeal. It was not Smith or 
Brown, but the human heart that judged him. 

Doubtless another advantage of these old poets 
was their out-of-door life. They went from audi- 
ence to audience on foot, and had no more cramped 
a study than the arch of heaven, no library but 
clouds, streams, mountains, woods, and men. There 
is something more in sunshine than mere light and 
heat. I fancy that a kind of flavor we detect in 
the old ballads is due to it, and that it may give 
color and bloom to the brain as well as to the apple 
and plum. Indoor inspiration is like the stove-heat 
of the forcing-house, and the fruits ripened by it 
are pale, dropsical, and wanting in tang. There 

74 



THE BALLADS 

may be also a virtue in the fireside which gives to 
the Northern wind a domestic and family warmth, 
and makes it skilled to teach the ethics of home. 
But it is not to the chimney-corner that we can 
trace the spiritual dynasties that have swayed man- 
kind. These have sunshine in their veins. 

Perhaps another charm of these ballads is that no- 
body made them. They seem to have come up like 
violets, and we have only to thank God for them. 
And we imply a sort of fondness when we call 
them "old." It is an epithet we give endearingly 
and not as supposing any decrepitude or senescence 
in them. Like all true poetry, they are not only 
young themselves, but the renewers of youth in 
us ; they do not lose, but accumulate, strength and 
life. A true poem gets a part of its inspiring force 
from each generation of men. The great stream of 
Homer rolls down to us out of the past, swollen 
with the tributary delight and admiration of the 
ages. The next generation will find Shakspeare 
fuller of meaning and energy by the addition of 
our enthusiasm. Sir Philip Sidney's admiration is 
part of the breath that sounds through the trumpet 
of "Chevy Chase." That is no empty gift with 
which we invest a poem when we bestow on it our 
own youth, and it is no small debt we owe the true 
poem that it preserves for us some youth to bestow. 

75 



LECTURE V 

CHAUCER 

{Tuesday Evening^ January 28, 1855) 



V 



TT is always a piece of good fortune to be the ear- 
liest acknowledged poet of any country. We 
prize the first poems as we do snowdrops, not only 
for their own intrinsic beauty, but even more for 
that force of heart and instinct of sunshine in them 
which brings them up, where grass is brown and 
trees are bare, the outposts and forlorn hopes of 
spring. There never comes anything again like a 
first sensation, and those who love Chaucer, though 
they may have learned late to do it, cannot help 
imaginatively antedating their delight, and giving 
him that place in the calendar of their personal ex- 
perience which belongs to him in the order of our 
poetic history. 

And the feeling is a true one, for although inten- 
sity be the great characteristic of all genius, and 
the power of the poet is measured by his ability to 
renew the charm of freshness in what is outworn 
and habitual, yet there is something in Chaucer 
which gives him a personal property in the epithet 

79 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

" vernal," and makes him seem always to go hand 
in hand with May. 

In our New England especially, where May-day 
is a mere superstition and the Maypole a poor 
half-hardy exotic which shivers in an east wind 
almost as sharp as Endicott's axe, — where frozen 
children, in unseasonable muslin, celebrate the 
floral games with nosegays from the milliner's, and 
winter reels back, like shattered Lear, bringing the 
dead spring in his arms, her budding breast and 
wan dilustered cheeks all overblown with the drifts 
and frosty streaks of his white beard, — where even 
Chanticleer, whose sap mounts earliest in that 
dawn of the year, stands dumb beneath the drip- 
ping eaves of his harem, with his melancholy tail 
at half-mast, — one has only to take down a vol- 
ume of Chaucer, and forthwith he can scarce step 
without crushing a daisy, and the sunshine flickers 
on small new leaves that throb thick with song of 
merle and mavis. A breath of spring blows out of 
the opening lines of the " Canterbury Tales " that 
seems to lift the hair upon our brow : 

When that Aprile with his showers soote 
The drought of March hath pierced to the roote, 
And bathed every vein in that licour 
Of whose virtue engendered is the flour; 
80 



CHAUCER 

When Zephirus eke with his sweet breath 
Enspired hath in every holt and heath 
The tender croppes ; and the younge sun 
Hath in the Ram half of his course yrun ; 
And little fowles maken melodie, 
That slepen all the night with open eye, 
So nature pricketh them in their courages. 

Even Shakspeare, who comes after everybody has 
done his best and seems to say, " Here, let me take 
hold a minute and show you how to do it," could 
not mend that. With Chaucer, the sun seems 
never to have run that other half of his course in 
the Eam, but to have stood still there and made 
one long spring-day of his life. 

Chaucer was probably born in 1328, seven years 
after the death of Dante, and he certainly died in 
1400, having lived consequently seventy-two years. 
Of his family we know nothing. He was educated 
either at Oxford or Cambridge, or at neither of 
these famous universities. He was, perhaps, a stu- 
dent at the Inner Temple, on the books of which 
a certain phantasmagoric Mr. Buckley had read a 
record that " Greoffrey Chaucer was fined two shil- 
lings for beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet 
street." 

In the thirty-ninth year of his age he received 
from Edward III a pension of twenty marks 

6 81 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

(equal to $1000 now), and afterwards a grant of a 
pitcher of wine daily, and the custody of a ward 
which gave £104 a year, and two places in the cus- 
toms. In the last year of Edward III he was one 
of three envoys sent to France to negotiate a mar- 
riage between the Prince of Wales and a daughter 
of the French King. Richard II confirmed his pen- 
sion of twenty marks, and granted him another of 
like amount instead of the daily wine. 

Chaucer married Philippa Pycard or De la Roet, 
sister of Katherine Swynf ord, the third wife of John 
of Gaunt. By this connection he is supposed to 
have become a favorer of Wycliffe's doctrines, and 
was in some way concerned in the insurrection of 
John of Northampton, which seems to have had for 
its object some religions reform. He was forced 
to fly into Holland, and is said to have made his 
peace at last by betraying his companions. I think 
one's historical comfort is not disturbed by refus- 
ing to credit this story, especially as it stains the 
fame of a great poet, and, if character may ever 
be judged from writings, a good man. We may 
grant that he broke the Franciscan friar's head in 
Fleet street, if it were only for the alliteration, but 
let us doubt that he ever broke his faith. It is very 
doubtful whether he was such stuff as martyrs are 
made of. Plump men, though nature would seem 

82 



CHAUCER 

to have marked them as more combustible, seldom 
go to the stake, but rather your lean fellows, who 
can feel a fine satisfaction in not burning well to 
spite the Philistines. 

At this period of his life Chaucer is thought to 
have been in straitened circumstances, but a new 
pension and a yearly pipe of wine were granted 
him by Richard II, and on the accession of Henry 
IV these were confirmed, with a further pension 
of forty marks. These he only lived a year to en- 
joy, dying October 25, 1400. 

The most poetical event in Chaucer's life the crit- 
ics have, of course, endeavored to take away from 
us. This is his meeting with Petrarch, to which he 
alludes in the prologue to the Clerk's " Tale of Gri- 
seldis." There is no reason for doubting this that 
I am able to discover, except that it is so pleasing 
to think of, and that Chaucer affirms it. Chaucer's 
embassy to Italy was in 1373, the last year of Pe- 
trarch's life, and it was in this very year that Pe- 
trarch first read the " Decameron." In his letter to 
Boccaccio he says : ^' The touching story of Griseldis 
has been ever since laid up in my memory that I 
may relate it in my conversations with my friends." 
We are forced to believe so many things that ought 
never to have happened that the heart ought to be 
allowed to recompense itself by receiving as fact, 

83 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

without too close a scrutiny of the evidence, what- 
ever deserved to take place so truly as this did. 
Reckoning back, then, by the finer astronomy of 
our poetic instinct, we find that a conjunction of 
these two stars of song did undoubtedly occur in 
that far-off heaven of the Past. 

On the whole, we may consider the life of Chaucer 
as one of the happiest, and also the most fortunate, 
that ever fell to the lot of poets. In the course of 
it he must have been brought into relation with all 
ranks of men. He had been a student of books, of 
manners, and of countries. In his description of 
the Clerk of Oxford, in which there is good ground 
for thinking that he alludes to some of his own 
characteristics, he says : 

For him was liefer have at his bed's head 

A twenty books clothed in black or red, 

Of Aristotle and his philosophy, 

Than robes rich, or fiddle or psaltery. 

But albeit that he was a philosopher, 

Yet had he but a little gold in coffer ; 

Of stud}^ took he the most care and heed. 

Not a word spake he more than there was need ; 

And that was said in form and reverence, 

And short and quick, and full of high sentence ; 

Sounding in moral virtue was his speech. 

And gladly would he learn, and gladly teach. 

84 



CHAUCER 

What a pleasant, companionable nature the last 
verse testifies to. The portrait of Chaucer, too, is 
perhaps more agreeable than that of any other 
English poet. The downcast, meditative eyes, the 
rich mouth, and the beautiful broad brow drooping 
with the weight of thought, and yet with an eternal 
youth and freshness shining out of it as from the 
morning forehead of a boy, are all remarkable, and 
their harmony with each other in a placid tender- 
ness not less so. 

Chaucer's beginnings as an author were transla- 
tions from the French and Italian. Imitations they 
should rather be called, for he put himself into them, 
and the mixture made a new poem. He helped 
himself without scruple from every quarter. And, 
indeed, there is nothing more clear than that the 
great poets are not sudden prodigies, but slow re- 
sults. Just as an oak profits by the foregone lives 
of immemorial vegetable races, so we may be sure 
that the genius of every remembered poet drew the 
forces that built it up from the decay of a whole 
forest of forgotten ones. And in proportion as the 
genius is vigorous and original will its indebtedness 
be ; will it strike its roots deeper into the past and 
into remoter fields in search of the virtue that must 
sustain it. 

Accordingly, Chaucer, like Shakspeare, invented 

6* 85 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

almost nothing. Wherever he found anything di- 
rected to Geoffrey Chancer he took it and made the 
most of it. Indeed, the works of the great poets 
teach us to hold invention somewhat cheap. The 
Proven(jal rhymers did the best to invent things 
that nobody ever thought of before, and they suc- 
ceeded in producing what nobody ever thought of 
again. He must be a very great poet indeed who 
can afford to say anything new. 

In the great poets I think there is always a flavor 
of race or country which gives them a peculiar 
nearness to those of the same blood, and where the 
face of the individual nature is most marked, it 
will be found that the type of family is also most 
deeply stamped. It is remarkable that Chaucer, 
who probably spoke French as often and as famil- 
iarly as English, who levied his contributions upon 
Norman, Italian, and Latin writers, should yet have 
become (with an exception) the most truly English 
of our poets. 

In endeavoring to point out what seem to be the 
peculiar characteristics of Chaucer, I think we shall 
find one of the chief to be this — that he is the first 
poet who has looked to nature as a motive of con- 
scious emotion. Accordingly, his descriptions are 
always simple and addressed to the eye rather than 
to the mind, or to the fancy rather than to the ima- 

8G 



CHAUCER 

gination. Very often lie is satisfied with giving a 
list of flowers with no epithet, or one expressive 
of color or perfume only. 

Mr. Lowell here read a number of passages from 
the "Assembly of Fowls" and other poems of 
Chaucer, with an extract from Spenser. 

Now I observe that all Chaucer's epithets are pri- 
mary, or such as give birth to the feeling ; and all 
Shakspeare's secondary, or such as the feeling gives 
birth to. In truth, Shakspeare's imagination is 
always dramatic, even in his narrative poems, and 
it was so abundant that the mere overflow of it has 
colored the very well-springs of the English lan- 
guage, and especially of English poetry. On Chau- 
cer, nature seems to have always smiled (except in 
winter, which he cordially hated), and no rumor of 
man's fall appears to have reached the trees and 
birds and flowers. Nature has taken to thinking 
lately, and a moral jumps up out of a blossom, like 
a jack-in-a-box. 

Another characteristic which we find in all the 
poems where Chaucer speaks in his own person is 
a sentiment of seclusion. He always dreams of 
walking in a park or a garden walled-in on every 
side. It is not narrowness but privacy that he 
delights in, and a certain feeling of generous limi- 
tation. In this his poems are the antithesis of 

87 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

Milton's, which always give a feeling of great 
spaces. 

In description it would be hard to find Chaucer's 
superior. His style is distinguished always by an 
energetic simplicity, which is a combination ex- 
ceedingly rare. It was apparently natural to him. 
But when he is describing anything that he loves, 
here is an inexpressible tenderness, as if his eyes 
filled with tears. His narrative flows on like one 
of our inland rivers, sometimes hastening a little, 
and in its eddies seeming to run sunshine ; some- 
times lingering smoothly, while here and there a 
beautiful quiet thought, a pure feeling, a golden- 
hearted verse opens as quietly as a water-lily, and 
makes no ripple. In modern times the desire for 
startling expression is so strong that people hardly 
think a thought is good for anything unless it goes 
off with a pop like a gingerbeer cork. 

In Chaucer's pathetic passages (and they are 
many), the presence of pity is a thing to be noticed 
— and the more so as he is the best pathetic story- 
teller among the English, and, except Dante, among 
the modern poets. Chaucer, when he comes to the 
sorrow of his story, seems to croon over the 
thoughts, and soothe them, and handle them with 
a pleasant compassionateness, as a child treats a 
wounded bird which he cannot make up his heart 

88 



CHAUCER 

to let go, and yet fears to close his fingers too 
firmly upon. 

Mr. Lowell, in illustration, read from the "Man 
of Law's Tale," and other of the poems. 

What I have said of Chaucer's pathos is equally 
true of his humor. It never ^/^vades a story, but 
pervades it. It circulates through all his comic 
tales like lively blood, and never puddles on the 
surface any unhealthy spots of extravasation. And 
this I take to be the highest merit of narrative — 
diffusion without diffuseness. 

I have not spoken yet of Chaucer's greatest work, 
the " Canterbury Tales." He has been greatly com- 
mended for his skill in the painting of character, 
and, indeed, nothing too good can be said of him in 
this respect. But I think it is too much the fash- 
ion to consider Chaucer as one of those Flemish 
painters who are called realists because they never 
painted the reality, but only the material. It is true 
that Chaucer is as minute in his costume as if he 
were illuminating a missal. Nothing escapes him — 
the cut of the beard, the color of the jerkin, the 
rustiness of the sword. He could not help this, his 
eye for the picturesque is so quick and sure. But 
in drawing the character it is quite otherwise. 
Here his style is large and free, and he emphasizes, 
but not too strongly, those points only which are 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

essential, and which give variety to his picture 
without any loss to the keeping. For he did not 
forget that he was painting history and not a por- 
trait. If his character of the good parson (which 
still stands not only unmatched but unapproached 
by the many later attempts at the same thing) 
seem an exception, it is yet in truth a confirmation 
of what I have said. For, in this case, for the very 
sake of keeping, it was necessary to be more full 
and careful, because the good parson alone must 
balance the friar, the pardoner, and all the other 
clerical personages who are almost unmixedly evil. 
Justice is always a leading quality in great minds, 
and by this single figure on one side and the group 
on the other Chaucer satirizes the Church, as it 
can only be satirized, by showing that it contrasts 
with that true religion with which it should be 
identical. And was there ever anything so happy 
as Chaucer's satire I Commonly satire is unhappy, 
but Chaucer's is positively more kindly than the 
panegyric of some poets. 

In calling Chaucer genial I chose the word with 
forethought. This geniality made it impossible 
that his satire should be intellectual. The satire of 
the intellect deals with the outside only, trying the 
thing satirized by a rigid standard. But it results 
from Chaucer's genial temperament that justice 

90 



CHAUCER 

in him is so equipoised by love that it becomes 
mercy, which is the point of rest between absolute 
law and human frailty. Therefore Chaucer, prop- 
erly speaking, is not a satirist but a humorist ; in 
other words, his satire is imaginative, and thus, in 
perfect subordination to narrative (though not to 
dramatic) art, he makes his characters satirize 
themselves. I suppose that no humorist ever 
makes anybody so thoroughly an object of satire 
as himself — but then one always satirizes himself 
kindly because he sees all sides. Falstaff is an ex- 
ample of this. Now this is just the character of 
imaginative or humorous satire, that the humorist 
enters his subject, assumes his consciousness, and 
works wholly from within. Accordingly when 
Chaucer makes his Frere or Pardoner expose all 
his own knaveries, we feel not as if he said, " See 
what a precious scamp this fellow is," but " This is 
the way we poor devils play fantastic tricks before 
high heaven." The butt of the humorist is Man 
(including himself and us) ; the butt of the satirist 
is always individual man. The humorist says ive; 
the moralist and satirist, thou. Here is the strength 
of the great imaginative satirist of modern times, 
Mr. Thackeray. 

In satire, the antithesis of Chaucer is Pope ; as a 
painter of life and manners, Crabbe, who had great 

91 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

powers of observation without imagination. There- 
fore what is simplicity in Chaucer is poverty in 
Crabbe. 

Chaucer is the first great poet who held up a mir- 
ror to contemporary life in its objectivity, and for 
the mere sake of its picturesqueness — that is, he is 
the first great poet who has treated To-day as if it 
were as good as Yesterday. Dante wrote life also, 
but it was his own life, and what is more, his own 
interior life. All his characters are represented in 
their relation to tliat But Chaucer reflected life in 
its large sense — the life of men^ from the knight to 
the ploughman. Thus it is that he always quietly 
and naturally rises above the Conventional into the 
Universal. And so his great poem lives forever in 
that perennial contemporaneousness which is the 
great privilege of genius. Thus the man of ge- 
nius has a double immortality — in heaven and 
on earth at the same time ; and this is what makes 
it good to he a genius at all, that their beauty and 
their goodness live after them, and every genera- 
tion of men can say of them — They are our friends 
also. 

I know not how to sum up what we feel about 
Chaucer except by saying, what would have pleased 
him most, that we love him. I would write on the 



92 



CHAUCER 

first page of his volume the inscription which he 
puts over the gate in his "Assembly of Fowls": 

Through me men go into the blissful place 
Of the heart's heal, and deadly woundes cure ; 
Through me men go into the welle of Grace, 
Where green and lusty May shall ever endure. 
This is the way to all good aventure ; 
Be glad thou reader, and thy sorrow offcast. 
All open am I, pass in, and hye thee fast. 



93 



LECTURE VI 

SPENSER 

{Friday Evening, January 26, 1855) 



VI 



CHAUCER had been in his grave one hundred 
and fifty years before England had secreted 
choice material enough to produce another great 
poet. Or, perhaps, we take it for granted that Na- 
ture understands her own business too well to make 
such productions cheap. Beauty, we know, has no 
charm like that of its eternal unexpectedness, and 
the best delight is that which blossoms from a stem 
of bare and long days. 

Or is it that the spirit of man, of every race of 
men, has its fatal ebbs and floods, its oscillations 
between the fluid ideal and the solid matter-of-fact, 
so that the doubtful line of shore between is in 
one generation a hard sandy actuality, with only 
such resemblances of beauty as a dead sea-moss 
here and there, and in the next is whelmed with 
those graceful curves of ever-gaining, ever-reced- 
ing foam, and that dance of joyous spray which 
knows not, so bright is it, whether it be sea or 
sunshine. 

7 97 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

What English Poetry was between Chaucer and 
Spenser there is no need to say. Scotland had 
given birth to two or three poets of that kind 
which is qualified by the epithet national, which is 
as much as saying that they took account only of 
the universe to the north-northeast corner of human 
nature instead of the whole circumference of it. 
England in the meanwhile had been enriched with 
Sternhold and Hopkins, but on the whole, the most 
important event between the death of Chaucer and 
the publication of the '' Faery Queene " was the in- 
troduction of blank verse. Perhaps the blank poetry 
suggested it. 

Before the " Faery Queene," also, two long poems 
were printed and popular — the "Mirror for Magis- 
trates," and "Albion's England." How the fii-st of 
these was ever read it is hard to conceive, unless 
we accept the theory of some theologians that our 
earth is only a kind of penal colony where men are 
punished for sins committed in some previous state 
of existence. The other was the work of one Warner, 
a conveyancer, and has a certain philological value 
now from its abounding in the popular phrases of 
the day. It is worth notice, also, as containing the 
most perfect example in the English language of 
what is called a conceit. It occurs in his account 
of Queen Elinor's treatment of Fair Rosamond : 



SPENSER 

With that she dashed her ou the lips 

So dyed double red ; 
Hard was the heart that struck the blow, 

Soft were the lips that bled. 



Which is nonsense and not poetry, though Dr. 
Percy admired it. Dr. Donne, and the poets whom 
Dr. Johnson called metaphysical (as if all poets 
are not so), is thought to be full of conceits. But 
the essence of a conceit is not in a comparison 
being far-fetched, — the imagination can make fire 
and water friendly when it likes, — but in playing 
upon the meanings of two words where one is taken 
in a metaphorical sense. This is a mark of the 
superficial mind always; whereas Donne's may be 
called a subterficial one, which went down to the 
roots of thought instead of playing with its 
blossoms. 

Not long after the "Faery Queene" were pub- 
lished the " Polyolbion " of Drayton, and the " Civil 
Wars " of Daniel. Both of these men were respect- 
able poets (especially Drayton), but neither of them 
could reconcile poetry with gazetteering or chroni- 
cle-making. They are as unlike as a declaration in 
love and a declaration in law. 

This was the period of the Saurians in English 
Poetry, interminable poems, book after book and. 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

canto after canto, like far-stretching vertehrce^ pro- 
digious creatures that rendered the earth unfit for 
the dwelling of Man. They are all dead now, the un- 
wieldy monsters — ichthyo-, plesio-, and megalosauri 
— they all sleep well, and their huge remains are 
found imbedded in those vast morasses, the '^Col- 
lections of the Poets." We wonder at the length of 
face and general atra-bilious look that mark the 
portraits of that generation; but it is no marvel 
when even the poetry was such downright hard 
work. Poems of this sort might have served to 
while away the three-centuried evening of ante- 
diluvian lives. It is easy to understand how our 
ancestors could achieve great things when they en- 
countered such hardships for mere amusement. If 
we agree with Horace in pitying the pre-Homeric 
heroes because they were without poets, we may 
sincerely commiserate our forefathers of that gen- 
eration because they had them. The reading of 
one of these productions must have been nearly as 
long a business as the taking of Troy, and deserved a 
poet to sing it. Perhaps fathers, when their time on 
earth was up, folded the leaf down and left the task 
to be finished by their sons — a dreary inheritance. 

The popularity of such works shows the insatiable 
thirst of the human soul for something which at 
least tried to be beyond mere matter-of-fact. This 

100 



SPENSER 

thirst for the ideal transmuted these books into 
poetry, just as the eternal drought of the desert 
turns muddy water into nectar, and the famine of 
the shipwrecked sailor gives a flavor beyond French 
cookery to a soup made of old shoes (jjotage mix 
choiix). But meanwhile Nature, who loves surprises, 
was quietly preparing a noble one. A new poet had 
been born, and came upon that arid century fresh 
and dewy as out of the first dawn that waked the 
birds in Eden. A great poet is always impossible — 
till he comes, and then he seems the simplest thing 
in the world to the commentators. He got this no- 
tice here and the other there ; similar subjects had 
been treated by such a one, and the metre first 
used by another. They give us all the terms of 
the equation ; satisfy us that a plus h minus c 
equals .r, only we are left in the dark as to what 
X is. The genius continues to be an unknown 
quantity. The great poet is as original as to-mor- 
row's sunrise, which will take the old clouds and va- 
pors, and little household smokes of our poor, worn- 
out earth to make a miracle out of, and transfigure 
the old hills and fields and houses with the en- 
chantment of familiar novelty. It is this power of 
being at once familiar and novel that distinguishes 
the primary poets. They give us a new heaven 
and a new earth without the former things having 

7* 101 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

passed away, — whose very charm is that they have 
not, — a new heaven and a new earth that we can 
possess by the fireside, in the street, and the count- 
ing-room. 

Edmund Spenser was born, like Chaucer, in Lon- 
don, in 1553, when Cervantes was six years old. 
That sixteenth century was a miraculous one. Scarce 
any other can show such a concurrence of great 
brains. Mothers must have expected an attack of 
genius among their children, as we look for measles 
or whooping-cough now. While Spenser was yet 
delving over the propria qnce fuarihtis, Shakspeare 
was stretching out his baby arms and trying to get 
the moon to play with, and the little Bacon, chewing 
upon his coral, had already learned the impenetra- 
bility of matter. It almost takes one's breath away 
to think that at the same time " Hamlet " and the 
" Novum Organon " were at the mercy of teething 
and the scarlet fever, unless, indeed, destiny takes 
care to lock the doors against those child-stealing 
gypsies when she leaves such precious things about. 

Of Spenser's personal history we know very little. 
He was educated at Cambridge, where he took the 
degree of Master of Arts in 1576. He is supposed 
to have passed the three following years with some 
relations in the country, where he wrote verses and 
fell in love with a lady whom he calls Rosalind, and 

102 



SPENSER 

of whom we know nothing further unless we are 
satisfied to take the portrait which Shakspeare has 
associated forever with the name which he com- 
plimented by adopting. He is said to have been 
employed to carry a despatch or two, but Lord 
Burleigh did not fancy him. Poor Lord Burleigh ! 
Sidney and Raleigh, however, were luckier. He 
was recommended to the great queen, and received 
at last a grant of Kilcolman Castle and three thou- 
sand acres of land in the south of Ireland. Here 
the " Faery Queene " was in great part written. At 
last came a rebellion. The wild kernes and gal- 
low-glasses had not the delicacy of the Emathian 
conqueror, and they burned the castle, from which 
Spenser and his wife with two of their children 
barely escaped, leaving an infant to perish in the 
flames. Spenser came to London and died broken- 
hearted three months afterward, on the 16th of Jan- 
uary, 1599. That rare nature was like a Tenice 
glass, meant only to mantle with the wine of the 
sunniest poetry. The first drop of poisonous sor- 
row shattered it. 

In 1579 Spenser published the " Shepherd's Cal- 
endar," a series of twelve eclogues, one for each 
month in the year. In these poems he professedly 
imitated Chaucer, whom he called his master, but 
without much success. Even with the light reflected 

103 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

upon them from the lustre of his great poem, one 
can find but little in them that is not dull. There 
are indications in these poems, however, here and 
there, of a nice ear for harmony in verse. 

Spenser was the pure sense of the Beautiful put 
into a human body only that it might have the 
means of communicating with men. His own de- 
scription of Clarion, the butterfly in his " Muiopot- 
mos," gives, perhaps, the best possible idea of his 
own character. 

Over the fields, in his frank lustiness, 
And all the champaign o'er, he soared light 

And all the country wide he did possess, 
Feeding upon their pleasures bounteously. 
That none gainsay, and none did him envy. 

The woods, the rivers, and the meadows green, 
With his air-cutting wings he measured wide, 

Nor did he leave the mountains bare unseen. 
Nor the rank grassy fens' delights untried ; 

But none of these, however sweet they been, 
Mote please his fancy, or him cause to abide ; 

His choiceful sense with every change doth flit. 

No common things may please a wavering wit. 

To the gay gardens his unstaid desire 

Him wholly carried, to refresh his sprights; 

There lavish Nature, in her last attire, 

Pours forth sweet odors and alluring sights j 

104 



SPENSER 

And Art, with her contending, doth aspire 
To excel the natural with made delights, 
And all that fair or pleasant may be found, 
In riotous excess doth there abound. 

There he arriving, round about doth file, 
From bed to bed, from one to the other border, 

And takes survey with curious busy eye, 
Of every flower and herb there set in order; 

Now this, now that, he tasteth tenderly, 
Yet none of them he rudely doth disorder ; 

He with his feet their silken leaves displace, 

But pastures on the pleasures of each place. 

And evermore with most variety 

And change of sweetness (for all change is sweet). 
He casts his glutton sense to satisfy, 

Now sucking of the sap of herbs most meet, 
Or of the dew which yet on them doth lie. 

Now in the same bathing his tender feet; 
And then he percheth on some branch thereby 
To weather him, and his moist wings to dry. 

And whatsoe'er of virtue good or ill. 

Grew in his garden fetched from far away, 

Of every one he takes and tastes at will, 
And on their pleasures greedily doth prey ; 

Then, when he hath both played and fed his fill. 
In the warm sun he doth himself embay. 

And there him rests in riotous sufifisance 

Of all his gladfulness and kingly joyance. 

105 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

What more felicity can fall a creature 

Than to enjoy delight with liberty! 
And to be lord of all the works of Nature, 

To reign in the air from earth to highest sky? 
To feed on flowers and weeds of glorious feature, 

To take whatever thing doth please the eye ^. 
Who rests not pleased with such happiness 
Well worthy he to taste of wretchedness. 

What poet has ever left us such a portrait of 
himself as this! In that butterfly Speuser has 
symbolized the purely poetical nature. It will be 
seen that there is no recognition of the moral sense 
whatever. The poetic nature considered abstractly 
craves only beauty and delight — without any 
thought beyond — 

And whatsoe'er of virtue good or ill, 

To feed on flowers and tveeds of glorious feature. 

The poetical temperament has nowhere been at 
once so exquisitely defined and illustrated. Among 
poets, Spenser stands for the temperament per- 
sonified. 

But how did it happen that this lightsome crea- 
ture, whose only business was 

To reign in the air from earth to highest sky, 

106 



SPENSER 

should have attempted in his greatest work to mix 
together two such incoherent things as sermon and 
poem? In the first place, the age out of which a 
man is born is the mother of his mind, and imprints 
her own likeness more or less clearly on the fea- 
tures of her child. There are two destinies from 
which no one can escape, his own idiosyncrasy, 
and that of the time in which he lives. Or shall 
we say that where the brain is in flower of its con- 
ceptions, the very air is full of thought-pollen, or 
some wandering bee will bring it, we know not from 
what far field, to hybridize the fruit I 

In Spenser's time England was just going through 
the vinous stage of that Puritanic fermentation 
which became acetous in Milton, and putrefactive 
in the Fifth Monarchy men. Here was one motive. 
But, besides this, it is evident that Spenser's fancy 
had been colored by the Romances which were 
popular in his day; and these had all been allego- 
rized by the monks, who turned them into prose. 
The adventure of the San Grail in the "Morte 
d'Arthur" reads almost like an extract from the 
^'Pilgrim's Progress." Allegories were the fashion, 
and Spenser put one on as he did a ruff, not because 
it was the most convenient or becoming thing in 
the world, but because other people did. 

Another reason is probably to be found in the 

107 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

nature of the man himself. The poetical tempera- 
ment, when it comes down to earth and mingles 
with men, is conscious of a certain weakness. On 
the unsubstantial skyey floors of its own ideal world 
it walks firmly enough, and speaks the native lan- 
guage of the shadowy population there. But there 
is a knell at which that beautiful land dissolves like 
the baseless fabric of a vision — and that is the 
dinner bell. The poetical temperament becomes 
keenly conscious that it also has a stomach. It 
must dine, and commonly it likes rather better din- 
ners than other people. To this end it must carry 
its wares to market where the understanding is 
master. Will the understanding pay hard money 
for the flowers of speech! Only what is practical 
will do there. " Fine words," grumbles the Under- 
standing proverbially, " butter no parsnips ; and 
then, to make the matter worse, the parsnips are 
ideaV " But, my dear sir," remonstrates Tempera- 
ment mildly — "Dear me no dears," growls Under- 
standing. "Everybody must earn his own salt — I 
do." " Let me read you my beautiful poem." 
" Can't comprehend a word of it. The only lan- 
guage I know a word of is my old mother tongue, 
the useful. Look at the towns and ships I 've built. 
Nothing ideal tliere^ you'll find. Ideal, I suppose, 
is a new-fangled way of spelling idle. It won't go 

108 



SPENSER 

/^ere." Suddenly the useful seems a very solid and 
powerful thing to our poor friend, the Poetic Tem- 
perament. It begins to feel a little absurd in talk- 
ing enthusiasm to such a matter-of-fact generation. 
The problem is how to translate the ideal into the 
useful. How shall Master Edmund Spenser make 
himself comprehensible to Master John Bull? He 
will try a picture-book, and a moral one, too — he 
will write an Allegory. 

Allegory is the Imagination of the Understanding, 
or what it supposes to be, which is the same thing. 
It is the ideal in words of one syllable, illustrated 
with cuts, and adapted to the meanest comprehen- 
sion. 

Spenser was a good and pure-minded man, and 
wished probably to combine the sacred office of 
Teacher with that of Poet. The preaching part of 
him came afterwards in Jeremy Taylor, who was 
Spenser with his singing-robes off. 

Spenser's mind was so thoroughly imbued with 
the beautiful that he makes even the Cave of Mam- 
mon a place one would like to live in. 

I think it is the want of liuman interest that 
makes the "Faery Queene" so little read. Hazlitt 
has said that nobody need be afraid of the alle- 
gory ; it will not bite them, nor meddle with them 
unless they meddle with it. It was the first poem 

109 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

I ever read, and I had no suspicion of any double 
meaning in it. If we think of the moral as we read 
it will injure the effect of the poem, because we 
have an instinctive feeling that Beauty includes its 
own moral, and does not need to have it stuck on. 

Charles Lamb made the most comprehensive 
criticism upon Spenser when he called him the 
'^ poets' poet." This was a magic mirror which he 
held up to life, where only shapes of loveliness are 
reflected. A joyous feeling of the beautiful thrills 
through the whole poem. 

I think that Spenser has come nearer to express- 
ing the unattainable something than any other poet. 
He is so purely a poet of beaut}^ that with him the 
meaning does not modulate the music of the verse, 
but the music is a great part of the meaning. 
No poet is so splendidly superfluous as he. He 
knows too well that in poetry enough is parsimony. 
The delight of beauty is that it is like a fountain, 
forever changing, forever the same, and forever 
more than full. 

Spenser has characterized his own poem in the 
song which the Sirens sing to Sir Gruyon in the 
twelfth canto of the second book. The whole pas- 
sage also may be called his musical as distinguished 
from his picturesque style. 

In reading Spenser one may see all the great gal- 

110 



SPENSER 

leries of painting without stepping over his thres- 
hold. Michael Angelo is the only artist that he will 
not find there. It may be said of him that he is not 
a narrative poet at all, that he tells no stories, but 
paints them. 

I have said that among our poets Spenser stands 
for the personification of the poetic sense and tem- 
perament. In him the senses were so sublimed 
and etherealized, and sympathized so harmoniously 
with an intellect of the subtlest quality that, with 
Dr. Donne, we " could almost say his body thought." 
This benign introfusion of sense and spirit it is 
which gives his poetry the charm of crystalline 
purity without loss of warmth. He is ideal without 
being merely imaginative; he is sensuous without 
any suggestion of flesh and blood. He is full of 
feeling, and yet of such a kind that we can neither 
call it mere intellectual perception of what is fair 
and good and touching, nor associate it with that 
throbbing warmth which leads us to call sensibility 
by its human name of heart. In the world into 
which he carries us there is neither space nor time, 
and so far it is purely intellectual, but then it is full 
of form and color and all earthly gorgeousness, and 
so far it is sensual. There are no men and women 
in it, and yet it throngs with airy ai.d immortal 
shapes that have the likeness of men and women. 

Ill 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

To appreciate fully the sensuous intellectuality 
of this divine poet, compare him for a moment 
with Pope, who had an equal subtlety of brain 
without the joyous poetic sense. Pope's mind was 
like a perfectly clear mirror hung in a drawing- 
room, and reflecting with perfect precision of out- 
line and vividness of coloring, not man, but good 
society, every grace and every folly that belong not 
to human nature in its broad meaning, but as it is 
subordinated by fashion. But Spenser is like a 
great calm pool that lies brooding in delicious 
reverie over its golden sands in some enchanted 
world. If we look into it we know not if we see the 
shadows of clouds and trees and castles, of bright- 
armored knights and peerless dames that linger 
and are gone ; or whether those pellucid depths are 
only a mysterious reservoir, where all the fairest 
dreams of our youth, dreams that were like hopes, 
and hopes that were but dreams, are vision arily 
gathered. Anon a ripple, born of no breeze, but of 
the poet's own conscious joy, startles it into a dance 
of sunshine that fades away around its shores in a 
lapsing murmur that seems the shadow of music 
rather than its substance. 

So entirely are beauty and delight the element of 
Spenser, that whenever in the •' Faery Queene " you 
come upon a thought or moral reflection it gives 

112 



SPENSER 

you a shock of unpleasant surprise, a kind of grit, 
as when one's teeth close upon a bit of gravel in 
a dish of strawberries and cream. He is the 
most fluent of our poets. Sensation passing over 
through emotion into reverie is the characteristic 
of his manner. 

And to read him puts one in the condition of 
reverie — a state of mind in which one's thoughts 
and feelings float motionless as you may see fishes 
do in a swift brook, only vibrating their fins 
enough to keep themselves from being swept down 
the current, while their bodies yield to all its 
curvings and quiver with the thrills of its fluid 
and sinuous delight. It is a luxury beyond lux- 
ury itself, for it is not only dreaming awake, but 
dreaming without the trouble of doing it your- 
self; letting it be done for you, in truth, by the 
finest dreamer that ever lived, who has the art of 
giving you all his own visions through the medium 
of music. 

Of the versification of Spenser we need attempt 
no higher praise than that it belonged to him. If 
we would feel the infinite variety of the Spenserian 
stanza, as Spenser uses it, its musical intricacies, 
its long, sliding cadences, smooth as the green slope 
on the edge of Niagara, we have only to read verses 
of the same measure by other poets. 

8 113 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

As showing his pathos, Mr. Lowell read Una's 
lament on her desertion by the Red Cross Knight, 
and othei' pieces, calling attention particularly to 
the fact that his females were not women, like those 
of Shakspeare, but ideal beings. 

We are accustomed to apologize for the grossness 
of our favorite old authors by saying that their age 
was to blame, and not they. Spenser needs no such 
excuses. He is the most perfect gentleman among 
poets. Through that unrefined time, when ladies 
drank a quart of ale for breakfast, and even Hamlet 
can say a coarse thing to Ophelia, Spenser passes 
pure and chaste as another Sir Gralahad. 

Whoever can endure unmixed delight, whoever 
can tolerate music, and painting, and poetry, all in 
one, whoever wishes to be rid of thought and to let 
the busy anvils of the brain be silent for a time, let 
him read in the "Faery Queene." There is a land of 
pure Heart's Ease where no ache or sorrow of spirit 
can enter. If there be any poet whom we can love 
and feel grateful toward, it is Edmund Spenser. 



114 



LECTURE VII 

MILTON 

{Tuesday Evening, January 30, 1855) 



VII 



BETWEEN Spenser and Milton occurred the 
most truly imaginative period of English 
poetry. It is the time of Shakspeare and of the 
other dramatists only less than he. It seems to 
have been the moment in which the English mind 
culminated. 

Even if we subtract Shakspeare, the age remains 
without a parallel. The English nature was just 
then giving a great heave and yearn toward free- 
dom in politics and religion, and literature could 
not fail to partake of the movement. 

A wave of enthusiasm seemed to break over 
England ; all that was poetical in the people found 
expression in deed or word. Everything tasted of 
it — sermons and speeches as well as verses. The 
travelers could not write a dry journal, but they 
somehow blundered into a poetical phrase that 
clings to the memory like a perfume. The sensa- 
tions of men were as fresh as Adam's, and the 
words they found to speak them in could be beau- 

8* 117 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

tiful or fragrant with as little effort as it costs 
violets to be blue. 

It is a remarkable fact that the poetry of Shak- 
speare is at the same time more English and more 
universally human than any that was ever written. 
The two great poets who came before Shakspeare 
had both of them enlarged the revenues of the 
English muse. Chaucer had added character and 
incident, and had shown the capacities of the lan- 
guage and of the metre. Spenser left it enriched 
with a luxury of diction, with harmony of verse, 
and with the lovely images of the classical myth- 
ology. But Shakspeare came in like an unthrift 
heir. He squandered everything. From king to 
clown he used up all character ; there is no passion, 
or fancy, or feeling that he has not spent ; no ques- 
tion of philosophy, morals, politics, or metaphysics 
that he has not solved; he poured out all the 
golden accumulations of diction like water. And 
his younger brethren, the other dramatists, helped 
him. What was there left! Certainly, this won- 
derful being has expressed every sentiment, every 
thought, that is universal in its relations. All the 
poetry of this world he exhausted. Accordingly, in 
the time immediately following this splendidly imag- 
inative period, we find only a development of fancy 
under one or other of its disguises. Fancy deals 

118 



MILTON 

with limited and personal experiences, and interests 
us by the grace or perfectness of its expression of 
these. The Dramatists were tremendously in ear- 
nest, as they had need to be, to please a people 
who were getting in earnest themselves. But now 
the time itself was preparing a drama, and on no 
mimic scene, but with England for a stage and with 
all Europe for spectators. A real historical play 
was in rehearsal, no petty war of York and Lan- 
caster, but the death-grapple of two eras. The 
time was in travail with the Ishmael of Puritanism 
who, exiled from his father's house, was to found 
here in this Western wilderness an empire for him- 
self and his wandering descendants. England her- 
self was turning poet, and would add her rhapsody 
to the great epic of the nations. 

That was a day of earnest and painful thinking, 
and poetical temperaments naturally found relief in 
turning away from actual life to the play of the 
fancy. We find no trace of high imagination here. 
Certainly, Herbert and Vaughan and even Quarles 
are sometimes snatched into something above com- 
mon fancy by religious fervor, but how cold and 
experimental is the greater part of their poetry — 
not poetry, indeed, but devotional exercises in 
verse. Cowley wrote imaginary love-songs to an 
imaginary mistress, and Waller the same sort of 

119 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

stuff to a real one. Catullus revived in Herrick, a 
country parson. Wither, a Puritan, wrote some 
poems full of nature and feeling, and remarka- 
ble for purity of sentiment. Donne, a deep thinker, 
carried on his anatomical studies into his verse, 
and dissected his thoughts and feelings to the small- 
est nerve. A great many nice things got said, no 
doubt, and many charming little poems were writ- 
ten — but the great style appears no longer. 
' It was during this lull, as we may call it, that fol- 
lowed the mighty day of the Dramatists, that Milton 
was growing up. He was born in London on the 
ninth of December, 1608, and was therefore in his 
eighth year when Shakspeare died. His father was 
of a good family, which still adhered to the Roman 
Catholic faith. What is of more importance, he was 
disinherited by his father for having adopted Puritan 
principles ; and he was a excellent musician. Mil- 
ton was very early an indefatigable student, even in 
his twelfth year seldom leaving his books before 
midnight. At the university he was distinguished 
as a Latin scholar and writer of Latin verses. He 
was intended for the Church, but had already 
formed opinions of his own which put conformity 
out of the question. He was by nature an Inde- 
pendent, and could not, as he says, "subscribe 
5 toe." 

120 



MILTON 

Leaving the university in 1632, he passed the 
five following years in a studious seclusion at his 
father's house at Horton, in Buckinghamshire. Du- 
ring these five years he wrote most of his smaller 
poems. In 1638 he set out for Italy. The most im- 
portant events of his stay in that country w^ere his 
meetings with Galileo, and the Marquis Man so, who 
had been Tasso's friend. After refreshing his Pro- 
testantism at Greneva, he passed through France 
and came back to England to find the Civil War 
already begun. 

Dr. Johnson sneers at Milton for having come 
home from Italy because he could not stay abroad 
while his countrymen were struggling for their 
freedom, and then quietly settling down as a 
teacher of a few boys for bread. It might, with 
equal reason, have been asked of the Doctor why, 
instead of writing " Taxation no Tyranny," he did 
not volunteer in the war against the rebel Ameri- 
can provinces! Milton sacrificed to the cause he 
thought holy something dearer to him than life — 
the hope of an earthly immortality in a great poem. 
He suffered his eyes to be put out for the sake of 
his country as deliberately as Scaevola thrust his 
hand into the flame. He gave to freedom some- 
thing better than a sword — words that were vic- 
tories. Around the memories of Bradshaw and 

121 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

his illustrious brethren his deathless soldiery still 
pitch their invincible tents, still keep their long- 
resounding march, sure warders against obloquy 
and oblivion. 

After the death of Cromwell, Milton continued 
faithful to republicanism, and on the very eve of the 
Restoration published his last political tract, show- 
ing a short and easy way to establish a Christian 
commonwealth. He had long ago quarreled with 
the Presbyterians in discipline, and separated from 
the Independents in doctrine. For many years he 
did not go within any church and had become 
a Unitarian. He had begun "Paradise Lost" in 
1658, and after the Restoration, with a broken for- 
tune, but with a constancy which nothing could 
break, shattered in health, blind, and for a time in 
danger, he continued the composition of it. It was 
complete in 1665, when El wood, the Quaker, had 
the reading of it, and it was published in 1667. 

The translation of the Bible had to a very great 
extent Judaized the Puritan mind. England was 
no longer England, but Israel. Those fierce en- 
thusiasts could always find Amalek and Philistia 
in the men who met them in the field, and one 
horn or the other of the beast in every doctrine 
of their theological adversaries. The spiritual pro- 
vincialism of the Jewish race found something con- 

122 



MILTON 

genial in the Anglo-Saxon intellect. This element 
of the Puritan character appears in Milton also, as 
in that stern sonnet : 

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones 
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold. 
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old 

When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones. 

In Milton's prose there is a constant assertion of 
himself as a man set apart to a divine ministry. 
He seems to translate himself out of Hebrew into 
English. And yet so steeped was he in Grreek cul- 
ture that it is sometimes hard to say whether he 
would rather call himself the messenger of Jehovah 
or the son of Phoebus. Continually the fugitive 
mists of dialectics are rent, and through them shine 
down serene and solemn peaks that make us feel 
that we are encamped about b}^ the sacred mounts 
of song, but whether of Palestine or of G-reece is 
doubtful. We may apply to Milton what Schiller 
says of the poet, " Let the kind divinity snatch the 
suckling from his mother's breast, nourish him with 
the milk of a better age, and let him come to maturity 
beneath a distant Grrecian sky. Then when he has 
become a man let him return, a foreign shape, into 
his century, not to delight it with his apparition, 
but terrible, like Agamemnon's son, to purify it." 

123 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

I said that Milton had a sublime egotism. The 
egotism of a great character is inspiration because 
it generalizes self into universal law. It is a very 
different thing from the vulgar egotism of a little 
nature which contracts universal Law into self. The 
one expands with a feeling that it is a part of the 
law-making power, the other offers an amendment in 
town-meeting as if it came from Sinai. Milton's su- 
perb conception of himself enters into all he does ; 
^f he is blind, it is with excess of light — it is a di- 
vine favor, an overshadowing with angel's wings^ 
Phineus and Tiresias are admitted among the pro- 
phets because they, too, had lost their sight. There 
is more merit in the blindness of Mseonides than 
in his " Iliad " or " Odyssey." If the structure of his 
mind is undramatic, why, then the English drama 
is barbarous, and he will write a tragedy on a 
Greek model with blind Samson for a hero. 

It results from this that no great poet is so uni- 
formly self-conscious as he. Dante is individual 
rather than self-conscious, and the cast-iron Dante 
becomes pliable as a field of grain at the breath of 
Beatrice, and his whole nature, rooted as it is, seems 
to flow away in waves of sunshine. But Milton 
never lets himself go for a moment. As other poets 
are possessed by their theme, so is he always self- 
possessed, his great theme being Milton, and his duty 

124 



MILTON 

being that of interpreter between John Milton and 
the world. I speak it reverently — he was worth 
translating. 

V We should say of Shakspeare that he had the 
power of transforming himself into everything, and 
of Milton that he had that of transforming every- 
thing into himself. He is the most learned of poets. 
Dante, it is true, represents all the scholarship of 
his age, but Milton belonged to a more learned age, 
was himself one of the most learned men in it, and 
included Dante himself among his learning. No 
poet is so indebted to books and so little to personal 
observation as he. I thought once that he had 
created out of his own consciousness those ex- 
quisite lines in '' Comus " : 

A thousand fantasies 
Begin to throng into my memory 
Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire, 
And airy tongues that syllable men's names 
On sands and shores and desert wildernesses. 

But I afterwards found that he had built them 
up out of a dry sentence in Marco Polo's " Travels." 
The wealth of Milton in this respect is wonderful. 
(He subsidizes whole provinces of learning to spend 
their revenues upon one lavish sentence, and melts 

125 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

history, poetry, mythology, and philosophy together 
to make the rich Miltonic metal of a siDgle verse. 

The first noticeable poem of Milton is his " Hymn 
of the Nativity," and the long-enwoven harmony of 
the versification is what chiefly deserves attention 
in it. It is this which marks the advent of a new 
power into English poetry. 

In Spenser meaning and music are fused to- 
gether; in Shakspeare the meaning dominates 
always (and I intend the sentiment as included in 
the word meaning) ; but in Milton the music is 
always a primary consideration. He is always as 
much musician as poet. And he is a harmonist, 
not a melodist. He loves great pomps and se- 
quences of verse, and his first passages move like 
long processions, winding with sacred chant, and 
priestly robes rich with emblematic gold, and waving 
of holy banners, along the echoing aisles of some 
cathedral. Accordingly, no reader of Milton can 
fail to notice that he is fond of lists of proper 
names which can have only an acquired imaginative 
value, and in that way serve to excite our poetic 
sensibility, but which also are of deep musical sig- 
nificance. 

This was illustrated by reading various passages 
from " Paradise Lost." 

Another striking peculiarity of Milton is the feel- 

126 



MILTON 

ing of spaciousness which his poetry gives us, and 
that not only in whole paragraphs, but even in sin- 
gle words. His mind was one which demanded il- 
limitable room to turn in. His finest passages are 
those in which the imagination diffuses itself over a 
whole scene or landscape, or where it seems to cir- 
cle like an eagle controlling with its eye broad 
sweeps of champaign and of sea, bathing itself in 
the blue streams of air, and seldom drawn earth- 
ward in the concentrated energy of its swoop. 

This shows itself unmistakably in the epithets 
of his earlier poems. In ''II Penseroso," for ex- 
ample, where he hears 

The far-off curfew sound 
Over some tvide-ivatered shore 
Swinging slow with sullen roar ; 

where he sees 

Gorgeous Tragedy 
In sceptered pall come sweeping by, 

or calls up the great bards who have sung 

Of forests and enchantments drear 
Where more is meant than meets the ear. 

/Milton seems to produce his effects by exciting or 
dilating our own imaginations ; and this excitement 

127 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

accomplished, lie is satisfied. Shakspeare, on the 
other hand, seldom leaves any work to be done by 
the imagination of his readers ; and after we have 
enjoyed the total effect of a passage, we may al- 
ways stndy the particulars with advantage. Shak- 
speare never attaches any particular value to his 
thoughts, or images, or phrases, but scatters them 
with a royal carelessness. Milton seems always to 
respect his ; he lays out broad avenues for the tri- 
umphal processions of his verse ; covers the ground 
with tapestry inwoven with figures of mythology 
and romance; builds up arches rich with historic 
carvings for them to march under, and accompanies 
them with swells and cadences of inspiring music. 
"Paradise Lost"'' is full of what may be called vistas 
of verse. Notice, for example, how far off he begins 
when he is about to speak of himself — as at the be- 
ginning of the third book and of the seventh. When 
you read "Paradise Lost" the feeling you have is 
one of vastness. You float under a great sky brim- 
med with sunshine, or hung with constellations ; the 
abyss of space is around you; thunders mutter on 
the horizon ; you hear the mysterious sigh of an 
unseen ocean ; and if the scene changes, it is with 
an elemental movement like the shifting of mighty 
winds. Of all books it seems most purely the work 
of a disembodied mind. Of all poets he could most 

128 



MILTON 

easily afford to be blind; of all, his poetry owes 
least to the senses, except that of hearing; every- 
thing, except his music, came to him through a 
mental medium, and perhaps even that may have 
been intellectual — as in Beethoven, who composed 
behind the veil of deafness. 

Milton is a remarkable instance of a great imag- 
inative faculty fed by books instead of Nature. 
One has only to read the notes of the commentators 
upon his poems to see how perfectly he made what- 
ever he took his own. Everything that he touches 
swells and towers into vastness. It is wonderful to 
see how, from the most withered and juiceless hint 
that he met in his reading, his grand images '^rise 
like an exhalation"; how from the most hopeless- 
looking leaden box that he found in that huge drag- 
net with which he gathered everything from the 
waters of learning, he could conjure a tall genius 
to do his bidding. 

That proud consciousness of his own strength, 
and confidence at the same time that he is the mes- 
senger of the Most High, never forsake him. It is 
they which give him his grand manner, and make 
him speak as if with the voice of a continent. He 
reverenced always the sacredness of his own call- 
ing and character. As poet, full of the lore of an- 
tiquity, and, as prophet, charged to vindicate the 

9 129 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

ways of God, it seems to me that I see the majestic 
old man laying one hand upon the shoulder of the 
Past, and the other upon that of the Future, and so 
standing sublimely erect above that abject age to 
pour his voice along the centuries. We are re- 
minded of what is told of Firdusi, whose father on 
the night he was born dreamed he saw him stand- 
ing in the middle of the earth and singing so loud 
and clear that he was heard in all four quarters of 
the heavens at once. 

I feel how utterly inadequate any single lecture 
must be on such a theme, and how impossible it is 
to say anything about Milton in an hour. I have 
merely touched upon three or four points that 
seemed to me most characteristic of his style, for 
our concern with him is solely as a poet. Yet it 
would be an unpardonable reticence if I did not say, 
before I close, how profoundly we ought to rever- 
ence the grandeur of the man, his incorruptible love 
of freedom, his scholarly and unvulgar republican- 
ism, his scorn of contemporary success, his faith in 
the future and in God, his noble frugality of life. 

The noise of those old warfares is hushed; the 
song of Cavalier and the fierce psalm of the Puritan 
are silent now; the hands of his episcopal adver- 
saries no longer hold pen or crozier — they and their 
works are dust ; but he who loved truth more than 

130 



MILTON 

life, who was faithful to the other world while he 
did his work in this; his seat is in that great ca- 
thedral whose far-echoing aisles are the ages whis- 
pering with blessed feet of the Saints, Martyrs, 
and Confessors of every clime and creed; whose 
bells sound only centurial hours; about whose 
spire crowned with the constellation of the cross no 
meaner birds than missioned angels hover; whose 
organ music is the various stops of endless changes 
breathed through by endless good; whose choris- 
ters are the elect spirits of all time, that sing, 
serene and shining as morning stars, the ever-re- 
newed mystery of Creative Power. 



131 



LECTURE VIII 

BUTLER 

[Friday Evening, Fehriiary 2, 1855) 



9* 



VIII 

NEITHER the Understanding nor the Imagina- 
tion is sane by itself ; the one becomes blank 
worldliness, the other hypochondria. A very little 
imagination is able to intoxicate a weak under- 
standing, and this appears to be the condition of 
religious enthusiasm in vulgar minds. Puritanism, 
as long as it had a material object to look forward 
to, was strong and healthy. But Fanaticism is al- 
ways defeated by success ; the moment it is estab- 
lished in the repose of power, it necessarily crystal- 
lizes into cant and formalism around any slenderest 
threads of dogma; and if the intellectual fermen- 
tation continue after the spiritual has ceased, as 
it constantly does, it is the fermentation of putre- 
faction, breeding nothing but the vermin of inco- 
herent and destructively-active metaphysic subtle- 
ties — the maggots, as Butler, condensing Lord 
Bacon, calls them, of corrupted texts. That wise 
man Oliver Cromwell has been reproached for 
desertion of principles because he recognized the 
truth that though enthusiasm may overturn a gov- 

135 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

ernment, it can never carry on one. Our Puritan 
ancestors came to the same conclusion, and have 
been as unwisely blamed for it. "While we wonder 
at the prophetic imagination of those heroic souls 
who could see in the little Mayflower the seeds of 
an empire, while we honor (as it can only truly 
be honored — by imitating) that fervor of purpose 
which could give up everything for principle, let 
us be thankful that they had also that manly Eng- 
lish sense which refused to sacrifice tJie'ir principles 
to the fantasy of every wandering Adoniram or 
Shear- Jashub who mistook himself for Providence 
as naturally and as obstinately as some lunatics 
suppose themselves to be tea-pots. 

The imaginative side of Puritanism found its po- 
etical expression in Milton and its prose in Bunyan. 
The intellectual vagaries of its decline were to have 
their satirist in Butler. He was born at Strensham 
in Worcestershire in 1612, the son of a small farmer 
who was obliged to pinch himself to afford his 
son a grammar-school education. It is more than 
doubtful whether he were ever at any university at 
all. His first employment was as clerk to Mr. Jef- 
fereys, a Worcestershire justice of the peace, called 
by the poet's biographers an eminent one. While 
in this situation he employed his leisure in study, 
and in cultivating music and painting, for both of 

136 



BUTLER 

which arts he had a predilection. He next went 
into the family of the Countess of Kent, where he 
had the use of a fine library, and where he acted as 
amanuensis to John Selden— the mere drippings of 
whose learning were enough to make a great scholar 
of him. After this he was employed (in what capa- 
city is unknown) in the house of Sir Samuel Luke, 
an officer of Cromwell, and a rigid Presbyterian. 
It was here that he made his studies for the char- 
acters of Sir Hudihras and his squire, Ralplw^ and 
is supposed to have begun the composition of 
his great work. There is hardly anything more 
comic in " Hudibras " itself than the solemn Coun- 
try Knight unconsciously furnishing clothes from 
his wardrobe, and a rope of his own twisting, to 
hang himself in eternal effigy with. Butler has been 
charged with ingratitude for having caricatured his 
employer ; but there is no hint of any obligation he 
was under, and the service of a man like him must 
have been a fair equivalent for any wages. 

On the other hand, it has been asserted that But- 
ler did not mean Sir Samuel Luke at all, but a cer- 
tain Sir Henry Rosewell, or a certain Colonel Rolle, 
both Devonshire men. And in confirmation of it we 
are told that Sir Hugh de Bras was the tutelary saint 
of Devonshire. Butler, however, did not have so 
far to go for a name, but borrowed it from Spenser. 

137 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

He himself is the authority for the " conjecture," as 
it is called, that his hero and Sir Samuel Luke were 
identical. At the end of the first canto of part first 
of " Hudibras " occurs a couplet of which the last 
part of the second verse is left blank. This coup- 
let, for want of attention to the accent, has been 
taken to be in ten-syllable measure, and therefore 
an exception to the rest of the poem. But it is only 
where we read it as a verse of four feet that the in- 
evitable rhyme becomes perfectly Hudibrastic. The 
knight himself is the speaker : 

'Tis Sling there is a valiant Mameluke 
In foreign lands yclept (Sir Sam Luke) 
To whom we have been oft compared 
For person, parts, address and beard. 

Butler died poor, but not in want, on the 25th of 
September, 1680, in his sixty-eighth year. 

Butler's poem is commonly considered the type 
of the burlesque — that is, as the representative of 
the gravely ludicrous, which seems to occupy a 
kind of neutral ground between the witty and the 
humorous. But this is true of the form rather than 
the matter of the poem. Burlesque appears to be 
wit infused with animal spirits — satire for the 
mere fun of the thing, without any suggestion of 
intellectual disapproval, or moral indignation. True 

138 



BUTLER 

wit is a kind of instantaneous logic which gives ns 
the quod erat demonstrandum without the interme- 
diate steps of the syllogism. Coleridge, with ad- 
mirable acuteness, has said that "there is such a 
thing as scientific wit." Therefore pure wit some- 
times gives an intellectual pleasure without making 
us laugh. The wit that makes us laugh most freely 
is that which instantly accepts another man's prem- 
ises, and draws a conclusion from them in its own 
favor. A country gentleman was once showing his 
improvements to the Prince de Ligne, and, among 
other things, pointed out to him a muddy spot 
which he called his lake. " It is rather shallow, is 
it not!" said the Prince. "I assure you. Prince, a 
man drowned himself in it." " Ah, he must have 
been a flatterer, then," answered De Ligne. Of the 
same kind is the story told of one of our old Massa- 
chusetts clergymen, Dr. Morse. At an association 
dinner a debate arose as to the benefit of whipping 
in bringing up children. The doctor took the af- 
firmative, and his chief opponent was a young min- 
ister whose reputation for veracity was not very 
high. He affirmed that parents often did harm 
to their children by unjust punishment from not 
knowing the facts in the case. " Why," said he, 
" the only time my father ever whipped me was 
for telling the truth." " Well," retorted the doctor, 

139 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

" it cured you of it, did n't it ? " In wit of this sort, 
there is always a latent syllogism. 

Then there is the wit which detects an uninten- 
tional bit of satire in a word of double meaning; 
as where Sir Henry Wotton takes advantage of the 
phrase commonly used in his day to imply merely 
residence, and finds an under meaning in it, saying 
that " ambassadors were persons sent to lie abroad 
for the service of their prince." 

On the other hand I think unconsciousness and 
want of intention, or at least the pretense of it, is 
more or less essential to the ludicrous. For this 
reason what may be called the wit of events is al- 
ways ludicrous. Nothing can be more so, for ex- 
ample, than the Pope's sending a Cardinal's hat to 
John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, which arrived in 
England after Henry VIII had taken off that pre- 
late's head. So, when Dr. Johnson said very gravely 
one day, that he had often tliouglit that if he had a 
harem he would dress all the ladies in white linen, 
the unintentional incongruity of the speech with 
the character of the great moralist threw Bo swell 
into an ecstasy of laughter. Like this is the ludi- 
crousness of Pope Paul III writing to the Council 
of Trent " that they should begin with original sin, 
observing yet a due respect unto the Emperor." 

Captain Basil Hall, when he traveled in this coun- 

140 



BUTLER 

try, found the Yankees a people entirely destitute 
of wit and humor. Perhaps our gravity, which 
ought to have put him on the right scent, deceived 
him. I do not know a more perfect example of wit 
than something which, as I have heard, was said to 
the captain himself. Stopping at a village inn there 
came up a thunderstorm, and Captain Hall, sur- 
prised that a new country should have reached 
such perfection in these meteorological manufac- 
tures, said to a bystander, " Why, you have very 
heavy thunder here," "Well, yes," replied the 
man, "we du^ considerin' the number of inhabi- 
tants." Here is another story which a stage-driver 
told me once. A wag on the outside of the coach 
called to a man by the roadside who was fencing 
some very poor land : " I say, mister, what are you 
fencing that pasture for ? It would take forty acres 
on 't to starve a middle-sized cow." "Jesso; and 
I 'm a-fencing of it to keep eour kettle eout." 

Now in the "forty acre" part of this story we 
have an instance of what is called American ex- 
aggeration, and which I take to be the symptom of 
most promise in Yankee fun. For it marks that 
desire for intensity of expression which is one 
phase of imagination. Indeed many of these say- 
ings are purely imaginative ; as where a man said 
of a painter he knew, that " he painted a shingle so 

141 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

exactly like marble that when it fell into the river 
it sunk." A man told me once that the people of 
a certain town were so universally dishonest that 
"they had to take in their stone walls at night." 
In some of these stories imagination appears yet 
more strongly, and in that contradictory union with 
the understanding lies at the root of highest humor. 
For example, a coachman driving up some steep 
mountains in Vermont was asked if they were as 
steep on the other side also. " Steep ! chain-lightnin' 
could n't go down 'em without the breechin' on." I 
believe that there is more latent humor among the 
American people than in any other, and that it will 
one day develop itself and find expression through 
Art. 

If we apply the definitions we have made to 
Butler's poem, we shall find that it is not properly 
humorous at all ; that the nearest approach to the 
humorous is burlesque. Irony is Butler's favorite 
weapon. But he always has an ulterior object. 
His characte]'s do not live at all, but are only cari- 
catured effigies of political enemies stuffed with 
bi-an and set up as targets for his wit. He never 
lets us forget for a moment that Presbyterian and 
Independent are primarily knaves and secondarily 
men. The personality never by accident expands 
into humanity. There is not a trace of imagination 

142 



BUTLER 

or of sympathy in his poem. It is pure satire, and 
intellectual satire only. There is as much creative - 
ness in Trumbull's " McFingal," or Fessenden's 
u Terrible Tractoration " as in " Hudibras." Butler 
never works from within, but stands as a spectator 
covering his victims with merciless ridicule; and 
we enjoy the fun because his figures are as mere 
nobodies as Punch and Judy, whose misfortunes 
are meant to amuse us, and whose unreality is part 
of the sport. The characters of truly humorous 
writers are as real to us as any of our acquain- 
tances. We no more doubt the existence of the 
Wife of Bath, of Don Quixote and Sancho, of Fal- 
staff, Sir Roger de Coverley, Parson Adams, the 
Vicar, Uncle Toby, Pickwick or Major Pendennis, 
than we do our own. They are the contemporaries 
of every generation forever. They are our immor- 
tal friends whose epitaph no man shall ever write. 
The only incantation needed to summon them is the 
taking of a book from our shelf, and they are with 
us with their wisdom, their wit, their courtesy, their 
humanity, and (dearer than all) their weaknesses. 
But the figures of Butler are wholly contem- 
poraneous with himself. They are dead things 
nailed to his age, like crows to a barn-door, for an 
immediate in terroreyn purpose, to waste and blow 
away with time and weather. The Guy Fawkes 

143 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

of a Fifth of November procession has as much 
manhood in it. 

Butler, then, is a wit — in the strictest sense of 
the word — with only such far-off hints at humor 
as lie in a sense of the odd, the droll, or the ludi- 
crous. But in wit he is supreme. '^ Hudibras " is 
as full of point as a paper of pins ; it sparkles like 
a phosphorescent sea, every separate drop of which 
contains half a dozen little fiery lives. Indeed, the 
fault of the poem (if it can be called a fault) is that 
it has too much wit to be easy reading. 

Butler had been a great reader, and out of the 
dryest books of school divinity, Puritan theology, 
metaphysics, medicine, astrology, mathematics, no 
matter what, his brain secreted wit as naturally as 
a field of corn will get so much silex out of a soil 
as would make flints for a whole arsenal of old- 
fashioned muskets, and where even Prometheus 
himself could not have found enough to strike a 
light with. I do sincerely believe that he would 
have found fun in a joke of Senator — well, any 
senator ; and that is saying a great deal. I speak 
of course, of senators at Washington. 

Mr. Lowell illustrated his criticism by copious 
quotations from " Hudibras." He concluded thus : 

It would not be just to leave Butler without add- 
ing that he was an honest and ^apparently disinter- 

144 



BUTLER 

ested man. He wrote an indignant satire against 
the vices of Charles the Second's court. Andrew 
Marvel, the friend of Milton, and the pattern of in- 
corruptible Republicanism, himself a finer poet and 
almost as great a wit as Butler — while he speaks 
contemptuously of the controversialists and satirists 
of his day, makes a special exception of "Hudibras." 
I can fancy John Bunyan enjoying it furtively, and 
Milton, if he had had such a thing as fun in him, 
would have laughed over it. 

Many greater men and greater poets have left 
a less valuable legacy to their countrymen than 
Butler, who has made them the heirs of a perpetual 
fund of good humor, which is more nearly allied to 
good morals than most people suspect. 



10 145 



LECTURE IX 

POPE 

(Thursday Evening, February 6, 1855) 



IX 



THERE is nothing more curious, whether in the 
history of individual men or of nations, than 
the reactions which occur at more or less frequent 
intervals. 

The human mind, both in persons and societies, 
is like a pendulum which, the moment it has 
reached the limit of its swing in one direction, goes 
inevitably back as far on the other side, and so on 
forever. 

These reactions occur in everything, from the 
highest to the lowest, from religion to fashions of 
dress. The close crop and sober doublet of the 
Puritan were followed by the laces and periwigs of 
Charles the Second. The scarlet coats of our 
grandfathers have been displaced by as general a 
blackness as if the world had all gone into mourn- 
ing. Tight sleeves alternate with loose, and the 
full-sailed expanses of Navarino have shrunk to 
those close-reefed phenomena which, like Milton's 
Demogorgon, are the name of bonnet without its 
appearance. 

10*' 149 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

English literature, for half a century from the 
Restoration, showed the marks of both reaction 
and of a kind of artistic vassalage to France. From 
the compulsory saintship and short hair of the 
Roundheads the world rushed eagerly toward a 
little wickedness and a wilderness of wig. Charles 
the Second brought back with him French man- 
ners, French morals, and French taste. The fond- 
ness of the English for foreign fashions had long 
been noted. It was a favorite butt of the satirists 
of Elizabeth's day. Everybody remembers what 
Portia says of the English lord : " How oddly is 
he suited ! I think he bought his doublet in Italy, 
his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germany, 
and his behavior everywhere." 

Dryden is the first eminent English poet whose 
works show the marks of French influence, and a 
decline from the artistic toward the artificial, from 
nature toward fashion. Dryden had known Milton, 
had visited the grand old man probably in that 
" small chamber hung with rusty green," where he 
is described as " sitting in an elbow-chair, neatly 
dressed in black, pale but not cadaverous " ; or 
had found him as he " used to sit in a gray, coarse 
cloth coat, at the door of his house near Bunhill 
Fields, in warm, sunny weather, to enjoy the fresh 
air." Dryden undertook to put the " Paradise Lost " 

150 



POPE 

into rhyme, and on Milton's leave being asked, lie 
said, rather contemptuously, " Ay, he may tag my 
verses if he will." He also said that Dryden was 
a "good rhymist, but no poet." Dryden turned 
the great epic into a drama called " The State of 
Innocence," and intended for representation on the 
stage. Sir Walter Scott dryly remarks that the 
costume of our first parents made it rather an 
awkward thing to bring them before the footlights. 
It is an illustration of the character of the times 
that Dryden makes Eve the mouthpiece of some- 
thing very like obscenity. Of the taste shown by 
such a travesty nothing need be said. 

In the poems of Dryden nothing is more strik- 
ing than the alternations between natural vigor and 
warmth of temperament and the merest common- 
places of diction. His strength lay chiefly in the un- 
derstanding, and for weight of sterling sense and 
masculine English, and force of argument, I know 
nothing better than his prose. His mind was a fer- 
vid one, and I think that in his verse he sometimes 
mistook metrical enthusiasm for poetry. In his 
poems we find wit, fancy, an amplitude of nature, a 
rapid and graphic statement of the externals and 
antitheses of character, and a dignified fluency of 
verse rising sometimes to majesty — but not much 
imagination in the high poetic meaning of the term. 

151 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

I have only spoken of his poems at all because 
they stand midway between the old era, which died 
with Milton and Sir Thomas Browne, and the new 
one which was just beginning. In the sixty years 
extending from 1660 to 1720, more French was im- 
ported into the language than at any other time 
since the Norman Conquest. What is of greater 
importance, it was French ideas and sentiments 
that were coming in now, and which shaped the 
spirit and, through that, the form of our literature. 

The condition of the English mind at the begin- 
ning of the last century was one particularly capa- 
ble of being magnetized from across the Channel. 
The loyalty of everybody, both in politics and reli- 
gion, had been dislocated. A generation of mate- 
rialists was to balance the over-spiritualism of the 
Puritans. The other world had had its turn long 
enough, and now tJds world was to have its chance. 
There seems to have been a universal skepticism, 
and in its most dangerous form — that is, united 
with a universal pretense of conformity. There 
was an unbelief that did not believe even in itself. 
Dean Swift, who looked forward to a bishopric, 
could write a book whose moral, if it had any, was 
that one religion was about as good as another, and 
accepted a cure of souls when it was doubtful if he 
thought men had any souls to be saved, or, at any 

152 



POPE 

rate, that they were worth saving if they had. The 
answer which Pulci's Margidte makes to Morgante, 
when he asks him if he believed in Christ or Ma- 
homet, would have expressed well enough the creed 
of the majority of that generation : 

Margutte answered then, To tell thee truly, 
My faith in black 's no greater than in azure ; 

But I believe in capons, roast meat, bouilli, 
And above all in wine — and carnal pleasure. 

It was impossible that anything truly great- — 
great, I mean, on the moral and emotional as well 
as on the intellectual sides — could be produced in 
such a generation. But something intellectually 
great could be, and was. The French mind, always 
stronger in the perceptive and analytic than in the 
imaginative faculty, loving precision, grace, and 
fineness, had brought wit and fancy, and the elegant 
arts of society, to the perfection, almost, of science. 
Its ideal in literature was to combine the appear- 
ance of carelessness and gayety of thought with 
intellectual exactness of statement. Its influence, 
then, in English literature will appear chiefly in 
neatness and facility of expression, in point of epi- 
grammatic compactness of phrase, and these in con- 
veying conventional rather than universal expe- 

153 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

riences; in speaking for good society rather than 
for man. 

Thus far in English poetry we have found life 
represented by Chaucer, the real life of men and 
women; the ideal or interior life as it relates to 
this world, by Spenser; what may be called ima- 
ginative life, by Shakspeare; the religious senti- 
ment, or interior life as it relates to the other 
world, by Milton. But everything aspires toward 
a rhythmical utterance of itself, and accordingly 
the intellect and life, as it relates to what may be 
called the world, were waiting for their poet. They 
found or made a most apt one in Alexander Pope. 

He stands for perfectness of intellectual expres- 
sion, and it is a striking instance how much suc- 
cess and permanence of reputation depend upon 
conscientious and laborious finish as well as upon 
natural endowments. 

I confess that I come to the treatment of Pope 
with diffidence. I was brought up in the old super- 
stition that he was the greatest poet that ever lived, 
and when I came to find that I had instincts of my 
own, and my mind was brought in contact with the 
apostles of a more esoteric doctrine of poetry, I felt 
that ardent desire for smashing the idols I had been 
brought up to worship, without any regard to their 
artistic beauty, which characterizes youthful zeal. 

154 



POPE 

What was it to me that Pope was a master of style ? 
I felt, as Addison says in his "Freeholder" in an- 
swering an argument in favor of the Pretender be- 
cause he could speak English and George I could 
not, " that I did not wish to be tyrannized over in 
the best English that was ever spoken." There was 
a time when I could not read Pope, but disliked 
him by instinct, as old Roger Ascham seems to 
have felt about Italy when he says : "I was once 
in Italy myself, but I thank God my abode there 
was only nine days." 

But Pope fills a very important place in the his- 
tory of English poetry, and must be studied by 
every one who would come to a clear knowledge of 
it. I have since read every line that Pope ever 
wrote, and every letter written by or to him, and 
that more than once. If I have not come to the 
conclusion that he is the greatest of poets, I believe 
I am at least in a condition to allow him every 
merit that is fairly his. I have said that Pope as a 
literary man represents precision and grace of ex- 
pression; but, as a fact, he represents something 
more — nothing less, namely, than one of those ex- 
ternal controversies of taste which will last as long 
as the Imagination and Understanding divide men 
between them. It is not a matter to be settled by 
any amount of argument or demonstration. Men 

155 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

are born Popists or Wordswortliiaris, Lockists or 
Kantists ; and there is nothing more to be said of 
the matter. We do not hear that the green specta- 
cles persuaded the horse into thinking that shav- 
ings were grass. 

That reader is happiest whose mind is broad 
enough to enjoy the natural school for its nature 
and the artificial for its artificiality, provided they 
be only good of their kind. At any rate, we must 
allow that a man who can produce one perfect work 
is either a great genius or a very lucky one. As 
far as we who read are concerned, it is of secondary 
importance which. And Pope has done this in the 
" Rape of the Lock." For wit, fancy, invention, and 
keeping, it has never been surpassed. I do not say 
that there is in it poetry of tlie highest order, or 
that Pope is a poet whom any one would choose as 
the companion of his best hours. There is no in- 
spiration in it, no trumpet call ; but for pure enter- 
tainment it is unmatched. 

The very earliest of Pope's productions gives in- 
dications of that sense and discretion, as well as 
wit, which afterwards so eminently distinguished 
him. The facility of expression is remarkable, and 
we find also that perfect balance of metre which he 
afterwards carried so far as to be wearisome. His 
pastorals were written in his sixteenth year, and 

156 



POPE 

their publication immediately brought him into 
notice. The following four verses from the first 
Pastoral are quite characteristic in their antithetic 
balance : 

You that, too wise for pride, too good for power, 
Enjoy the glory to be great no more, 
And carrying with you all the world can boast. 
To all the world illustriously are lost. 

The sentiment is affected, and reminds one of 
that future period of Pope's correspondence with 
his friends, where Swift, his heart corroding with 
disappointed ambition at Dublin, Bolingbroke rais- 
ing delusive turnips at his farm, and Pope pre- 
tending to disregard the lampoons which embit- 
tered his life, played together the solemn farce of 
affecting to despise the world which it would have 
agonized them to be forgotten by. 

In Pope's next poem, the " Essay on Criticism," 
the wit and poet become apparent. It is full of 
clear thoughts compactly expressed. In this poem, 
written when Pope was only twenty-one, occur 
some of those lines which have become proverbial, 
such as : 

A little learning is a dangerous thing ; 

For fools rush in where angels fear to tread ; 

157 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

True Wit is Nature to advantage dressed, 

What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed ; 

For each ill author is as bad a friend. 

In all these we notice that terseness in which (re- 
gard being had to his especial range of thought) 
Pope has never been equaled. One cannot help 
being struck also with the singular discretion which 
the poem gives evidence of. I do not know where 
to look for another author in whom it appeared 
so early ; and considering the vivacity of his mind 
and the constantly besetting temptation of his wit, 
it is still more wonderful. In his boyish corre- 
spondence with poor old Wycherly, one would sup- 
pose him to be a man and Wycherly the youth. 
Pope's understanding was no less vigorous than his 
fancy was lightsome and sprightly. 

I come now to what in itself would be enough to 
have immortalized him as a poet, the " Eape of the 
Lock," in which, indeed, he appears more purely as 
a poet than in any other of his productions. Else- 
where he has shown more force, more wit, more 
reach of thought, but nowhere such a truly artistic 
combination of elegance and fancy. His genius 
has here found its true direction, and the very same 
artificiality which in his Pastorals was unpleasing 
heightens the effect and adds to the general keep- 

158 



POPE 

ing. As truly as Shakspeare is the poet of man 
as God made him, dealing with great passions and 
innate motives, so truly is Pope the poet of society, 
the delineator of manners, the exposer of those mo- 
tives which may be called acquired, whose spring is 
in institutions and habits of purely worldly origin. 

The whole poem more truly deserves the name 
of a creation than anything Pope ever wrote. The 
action is confined to a world of his own, the super- 
natural agency is wholly of his own contrivance, 
and nothing is allowed to overstep the limitations 
of the subject., It ranks by itself as one of the 
purest works of human fancy. Whether that fancy 
be truly poetical or not is another matter. The per- 
fection of form in the " Rape of the Lock " is to me 
conclusive evidence that in it the natural genius of 
Pope found fuller and freer expression than in any 
other of his poems. The others are aggregates of 
brilliant passages rather than harmonious wholes. 

Mr. Lowell gave a detailed analysis of the poem, 
with extracts of some length. 

The " Essay on Man " has been praised and ad- 
mired by men of the most opposite beliefs, and men 
of no belief at all. Bishops and free-thinkers have 
met here on a common ground of sympathetic ap- 
proval. And, indeed, there is no particular faith 
in it. It is a droll medley of inconsistent opinions. 

159 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

It proves only two things beyond a question : that 
Pope was not a great thinker; and that wherever 
he found a thought, no matter what, he would ex- 
press it so tersely, so clearly, and with such smooth- 
ness of versification, as to give it an everlasting 
currency. Hobbes's unwieldy " Leviathan," left 
stranded on the shore of the last age and nauseous 
with the stench of its selfishness — from this Pope 
distilled a fragrant oil with which to fill the bril- 
liant lamps of his philosophy, lamps like those in the 
tombs of alchemists, that go out the moment the 
healthy air is let in upon them. The only positive 
doctrine in the poem is the selfishness of Hobbes 
set to music, and the pantheism of Spinoza brought 
down from mysticism to commonplace. Nothing 
can be more absurd than many of the dogmas 
taught in the " Essay on Man." 

The accuracy on which Pope prided himself, and 
for which he is commended, was not accuracy of 
thought so much as of expression. But the suppo- 
sition is that in the " Essay on Man " Pope did not 
know what he was writing himself. He was only 
the condenser and epigrammatizer of Bolingbroke 
• — a fitting St. John for such a gospel. Or if he did 
know, we can account for the contradictions by 
supposing that he threw in some of the commonplace 
moralities to conceal his real drift. Johnson asserts 

160 



POPE 

that Bolingbroke in private laughed at Pope's hav- 
ing been made the mouthpiece of opinions which 
he did not hold. But this is hardly probable when 
we consider the relations between them. It is giv- 
ing Pope altogether too little credit for intelligence 
to suppose that he did not understand the principles 
of his intimate friend. 

Dr. Warburton makes a rather lame attempt to 
ward off the charge of Spinozism from the '^ Essay 
on Man." He would have found it harder to show 
that the acknowledgment of any divine revelation 
would not overthrow the greater part of its teach- 
ings. If Pope intended by his poem all that the 
Bishop takes for granted in his commentary, we 
must deny him what is usually claimed as his first 
merit — clearness. If we did not^ we grant him 
clearness as a writer at the expense of sincerity as 
a man. Perhaps a more charitable solution of the 
difficulty is that Pope's precision of thought was 
not equal to his polish of style. 

But it is in his " Moral Essays " and part of his 
" Satires " that Pope deserves the praise which he 
himself desired — 

Happily to steer 
From grave to gay, from lively to severe. 
Correct with spirit, eloquent with ease, 
Intent to reason, or polite to please. 

11 161 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

Here Pope must be allowed to have established a 
style of his own, in which he is without a rival. 
One can open upon wit and epigram at every page. 

In his epistle on the characters of woman, no one 
who has ever known a noble woman will find much 
to please him. The climax of his praise rather 
degrades than elevates : 

O blest in temper, whose unclouded ray 
Can make to-morrow cheerful as to-day, 
She who can love a sister's charms, or hear 
Sighs for a daughter with unwounded ear, 
She who ne'er answers till a husband cools, 
Or if she rules him, never shows she rules, 
Charms by accepting, by submitting sways, 
Yet has her humor most when she obeys ; 
Let fops or fortune fly which way they will, 
Disdains all loss of tickets, or codille, 
Spleen, vapors, or smallpox, above them all ; 
And mistress of herself though china fall. 

The last line is very witty and pointed ; but con- 
sider what an ideal of womanly nobleness he must 
have had who praises his heroine for not being 
jealous of her daughter. 

It is very possible that the women of Pope's time 
were as bad as they could be, but if Ood made 
poets for anything it was to keep alive the tradi- 

162 



POPE 

tions of the pure, the holy, and the beautiful. I 
grant the influence of the age, but there is a sense 
in which the poet is of no age, and Beauty, driven 
from every other home, will never be an outcast 
and a wanderer while there is a poet-nature left; 
will never fail of the tribute at least of a song. It 
seems to me that Pope had a sense of the nice 
rather than of the beautiful. His nature delighted 
in the blemish more than in the charm. 

Personally, we know more about Pope than about 
any of our poets. He kept no secret about himself. 
If he did not let the cat out of the bag, he always 
contrived to give her tail a pinch so that we might 
know she was there. In spite of the savageness of 
his satires, his disposition seems to have been a 
truly amiable one, and his character as an author 
was as purely fictitious as his style. I think that 
there was very little real malice in him. 

A great deal must be allowed to Pope for the age 
in which he lived, and not a little, I think, for the 
influence of Swift. In his own province he still 
stands unapproachably alone. If to be the greatest 
satirist of individual men rather than of human na- 
ture ; if to be the highest expression which the life 
of court and the ball-room has ever found in verse ; 
if to have added more phrases to our language than 
any other but Shakspeare ; if to have charmed four 

163 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

generations makes a man a great poet, then he is 
one. He was the chief founder of an artificial style 
of writing which in his hand was living and power- 
ful because he used it to express artificial modes of 
thinking and an artificial state of society. Mea- 
sured by any high standard of imagination, he will 
be found wanting; tried by any test of wdt, he is 
unrivaled. 

To what fatuities his theory of correctness led in 
the next generation, when practised upon by men 
who had not his genius, I shall endeavor to show in 
my next lecture. 



164 



LECTUEE X 

POETIC DICTION 

(Friday Evening, Fehruary 9, 1855) 



11* 



No one who has read any early poems, of what- 
ever nation, can have failed to notice a fresh- 
ness in the language — a sort of game flavor, as it 
were — that gradually wastes out of it when poetry 
becomes domesticated, so to speak, and has grown to 
be a mere means of amusement both to writers and 
readers, instead of answering a deeper necessity 
in their natures. Our Northern ancestors symbol- 
ized the eternal newness of song by calling it the 
Present, and its delight by calling it the drink of 
Odin. 

There was then a fierce democracy of words ; no 
grades had then been established, and no favored 
ones advanced to the Upper House of Poetry. Men 
had a meaning, and so their words had to have one, 
too. They were not representatives of value, but 
value itself. They say that Valhalla was roofed with 
golden shields ; that w^as what they believed, and 
in their songs they called them golden shingles. 
We should think shields the more poetical word of 
the two ; but to them the poetry was in the tiling^ 

167 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

and the thought of it and the phrase took its life 
and meaning from them. 

It is one result of the admixture of foreign words 
in our language that we use a great many phrases 
without knowing the force of them. There is a 
metaphoric vitality hidden in almost all of them, 
and we talk poetry as Moliere's citizen did prose, 
without ever suspecting it. Formerly men named 
things ; now we merely label them to know them 
apart. The Vikings called their ships sea-horses, 
just as the Arabs called their camels ships of the 
desert. Capes they called sea-noses, without think- 
ing it an undignified term which the land would 
resent. And still, where mountains and headlands 
have the luck to be baptized by uncultivated per- 
sons. Fancy stands godmother. Old Greylock, up 
in Berkshire, got his surname before we had State 
geologists or distinguished statesmen. So did 
Great Haystack and Saddle-Mountain. Sailors give 
good names, if they have no dictionary aboard, and 
along our coasts, here and there, the word and 
the thing agree, and therefore are poetical. Mean- 
ing and poetry still cling to some of our common 
phrases, and the crow-foot, mouse-ear, goat's-beard, 
day's-ej^e, heart's-ease, snow-drop, and many more 
of their vulgar little fellow-citizens of the wood and 
roadsides are as happy as if Linnseus had never 

168 



POETIC DICTION 

been born. Such names have a significance even 
to one who has never seen the things they stand for, 
but whose fancy would not be touched about a pel- 
argonium unless he had an acquired sympathy with 
it. Our "cumulus" language, heaped together from 
all quarters, is like the clouds at sunset, and every 
man finds something diiferent in a sentence, accord- 
ing to his associations. Indeed, every language that 
has become a literary one may be compared to a 
waning moon, out of which the light of beauty fades 
more and more. Only to poets and lovers does it 
repair itself from its luminous fountains. 

The poetical quality of diction depends on the 
force and intensity of meaning with which it is 
employed. We are all of us full of latent signifi- 
cance, and let a poet have but the power to touch 
us, we forthwith enrich his word with ourselves, 
pouring into his verse our own lives, all our own 
experience, and take back again, without know- 
ing it, the vitality which we had given away out of 
ourselves. Put passion enough into a word, and 
no matter what it is it becomes poetical ; it is no 
longer what it was, but is a messenger from original 
man to original man, an ambassador from royal 
Thee to royal Me, and speaks to us from a level of 
equality. Pope, who did not scruple to employ the 
thoughts of Billingsgate, is very fastidious about 

169 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

the dress they come in, and claps a tawdry livery- 
coat on them, that they may be fit for the service 
of so fine a gentleman. He did not mind being 
coarse in idea, but it would have been torture to 
him to be thought commonplace. The sin of com- 
position which he dreaded was, 

Lest ten low words should creep in one dull line. 

But there is no more startling proof of the ge- 
nius of Shakspeare than that he always lifts the 
language up to himself, and never thinks to raise 
himself atop of it. If he has need of the service of 
what is called a low word, he takes it, and it is re- 
markable how many of his images are borrowed out 
of the street and the workshop. His pen ennobled 
them all, and we feel as if they had been knighted 
for good service in the field. Shakspeare, as we all 
know (for does not Mr. Voltaire say so !), was a vul- 
gar kind of fellow, but somehow or other his ge- 
nius will carry the humblest things up into the air 
of heaven as easily as Jove's eagle bore Ganymede. 

Whatever is used with a great meaning, and con- 
veys that meaning to others in its full intensity, is 
no longer common and ordinary. It is this which 
gives their poetic force to symbols, no matter how 
low their origin. The blacksmith's apron, once 
made the royal standard of Persia, can fill armies 

170 



POETIC DICTION 

with enthusiasm and is as good as the oriflamme 
of France. A broom is no very noble thing in it- 
self, but at the mast-head of a brave old De Ruyter, 
or in the hands of that awful shape which Dion 
the Syracusan saw, it becomes x>oetical. And so 
the emblems of the tradesmen of Antwerp, which 
they bore upon their standards, pass entirely out of 
the prosaic and mechanical by being associated with 
feelings and deeds that were great and momentous. 

Mr. Lowell here read a poem by Dr. Donne en- 
titled " The Separation." 

As respects Diction, that becomes formal and 
technical when poetry has come to be considered an 
artifice rather than an art, and when its sole object 
is to revive certain pleasurable feelings already 
conventional, instead of originating new sources of 
deliglit. Then it is truly earth to earth ; dead lan- 
guage used to bury dead emotion in. This kind of 
thing was carried so far by the later Scandinavian 
poets that they compiled a dictionary of the meta- 
phors used by the elder Skalds (whose songs were 
the utterance of that within them which ivoulcl be 
spoken), and satisfied themselves with a new ar- 
rangement of them. Inspiration was taught, as we 
see French advertised to be, in six lessons. 

171 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

In narrative and descriptive poetry we feel that 
proper keeping demands a certain choice and lux- 
ury of words. The question of propriety becomes 
one of prime importance here. Certain terms have 
an acquired imaginative value from the associations 
they awake in us. Certain words are more musical 
than others. Some rhymes are displeasing; some 
measures wearisome. Moreover, there are words 
which have become indissolubly entangled with lu- 
dicrous or mean ideas. Hence it follows that there 
is such a thing as Poetic Diction, and it was this 
that Milton was thinking of when he spoke of 
making our English '' search her coffers round." 

I will illustrate this. Longfellow's " Evangeline " 
opens with a noble solemnity : 

This is the forest primeval; the murnmring pines and 
the hemlocks, 

Bearded with moss and in garments green, indistinct in 
the twilight, 

Stand like the Druids of eld, with voices sad and pro- 
phetic, 

Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their 
bosoms. 

Loud from its rocky caverns the deep-voiced neighboring 
ocean 

Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of 
the forest. 

172 



POETIC DICTION 

There is true feeling here, and the sigh of the 
pines is heard in the verses. I can find only one 
epithet to hang a criticism on, and that is the ''wail 
of the forest " in the last line, which is not in keep- 
ing with the general murmur. Now I do not sup- 
pose that the poet turned over any vocabulary to 
find the words he wanted, but followed his own po- 
etic instinct altogether in the affair. But suppose 
for a moment, that instead of being a true poet, 
he had been only a gentleman versifying ; suppose 
he had written, " This is the primitive forest." The 
prose meaning is the same, but the poetical mean- 
ing, the music, and the cadence would be gone out 
of it, and gone forever. Or suppose that, instead 
of "garments green," he had said "dresses green"; 
the idea is identical, but the phrase would have 
come down from its api)ropriate remoteness to the 
milliner's counter. But not to take such extreme 
instances, only substitute instead of " harpers 
hoar," the words " harpers gray," and you lose 
not only the alliteration, but the fine hoarse sigh 
of the original epithet, which blends with it the 
general feeling of the passage. So if you put 
" sandy beaches " in the place of " rocky caverns," 
you will not mar the absolute truth to nature, 
but you will have forfeited the relative truth to 
keeping. 

173 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 
When Bryant says so exquisitely, 

Painted moths 
Have wandered the blue sky and died again, 

we ruin the poetry, the sunny spaciousness of the 
image, without altering the prose sense, by sub- 
stituting 

Have flown through the clear air. 

But the words " poetic diction " have acquired a 
double meaning, or perhaps I should say there are 
two kinds of poetic diction, the one true and the 
other false, the one real and vital, the other me- 
chanical and artificial. Wordsworth for a time 
confounded the two together in one wrathful con- 
demnation, and preached a crusade against them 
both. He wrote, at one time, on the theory that the 
language of ordinarv life was the true dialect of 
poetry, and that one word was as good as another. 
He seemed even to go farther and to adopt the 
Irishman's notion of popular equality, that "one 
man is as good as another, and a dale better, too." 
He preferred, now and then, prosaic words and im- 
ages to poetical ones. But he was not long in find- 
ing his mistake and correcting it. One of his most 

174 



POETIC DICTION 

tender and pathetic poems, '' We are Seven," began 
thus in the first edition : 

A simple child, dear hrother Jim. 

All England laughed, and in the third edition 

Wordsworth gave in and left the last half of the 

line blank, as it has been ever since. If the poem 

had been a translation from the Turkish and had 

begun, 

A simple child, dear Ibrahim, 

there would have been nothing unpoetical in it; 
but the " dear brother Jim," which would seem 
natural enough at the beginning of a familiar let- 
ter, is felt to be ludicrously incongruous at the 
opening of a poem. 

To express a profound emotion, the simpler the 
language and the less removed from the ordinary 
course of life the better. There is a very striking 
example of this in Webster's tragedy of " The 
Duchess of Malfy." The brother of the Duchess 
has procured her murder, and when he comes in 
and sees the body he merely says : 

^^ Cover her face ; mine eyes dazzle ; she died young." 

Horror could not be better expressed than in 
these few words, and Webster has even taken care 

175 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

to break up the verse in such a way that a too en- 
tire consciousness of the metre may not thrust it- 
self between us and the bare emotion he intends 
to convey. 

In iUustration, Mr. Lowell quoted from Shak- 
speare (" Henry V"), Marlowe, Chapman, Dunbar, 
Beaumont and Fletcher, Waller, Young, and Caw- 
thorn. 

These men [the poets of the eighteenth century] 
were perfectly conscious of the fact that poetry is 
not produced under an ordinary condition of the 
mind, and accordingly, when they begin to grind 
their barrel-organs, they go through the ceremony 
of invoking the Muse, talk in the blandest way of 
divine rages and sacred flames, and one thing or 
another, and ask for holy fire to heat their little 
tea-urns with as coolly as one would borrow a luci- 
fer. They appeal ceremoniously to the "sacred 
Nine," when the only thing really necessary to them 
was the ability to count as high as the sacred ten 
syllables that constituted their verse. If the Muse 
had once granted their prayer, if she had once un- 
veiled her awful front to the poor fellows, they 
would have hidden under their beds, every man 
John of them. 

The eighteenth century produced some true 
poets, but almost all, even of them, were infected 

176 



POETIC DICTION 

by the prevailing style. I cannot find any name 
that expresses it better than the " Dick Swiveller 
style." As Dick always called wine the "rosy," 
sleep the " balmy," and so forth, so did these per- 
fectly correct gentlemen always employ either a 
fluent epithet or a diffuse paraphrasis to express 
the commonest emotions or ideas. If they wished 
to say tea the}^ would have done it thus : 

Of China's herb the infusion hot and mild. 

Coffee would be 

The fragrant juice of Mocha's kernel gray, 

or brown or black, as the rhyme demanded. A 
boot is dignified into 

The shining leather that the leg encased. 

Wine is 

The purple honor of th' ambrosial vine. 

All women are " nymphs," carriages are " harnessed 
pomps," houses are sumptuous or humble " piles," 
as the case may be, and everything is purely tech- 
nical. Of nature there seems to have been hardly 
a tradition. 
But instead of attempting to describe in prose the 

12 177 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

diluent diction which passed for poetic under the 
artificial system — which the influence of Words- 
worth did more than anything else to abolish and 
destroy — I will do it by a few verses in the same 
style. Any subject will do — a Lapland sketch, we 
will say : 

Where far-off suns their fainter splendors throw 
O'er Lapland's wastes of uncongenial snow, 
Where giant icebergs lift their horrent spires 
And the blank scene a gelid fear expires, 
Where oft the aurora of the northern night 
Cheats with pale beams of ineffectual light, 
Where icy Winter broods o'er hill and plain, 
And Summer never comes, or comes in vain ; 
Yet here, e'en here, kind Nature grants to man 
A boon congenial with her general plan. 
Though no fair blooms to vernal gales expand, 
And smiling Ceres shuns th' unyielding land, 
Behold, even here, cast up a monstrous spoil, 
The sea's vast monarch yields nutritious oil. 
Escaped, perchance, from where the unfeeling crews 
Dart the swift steel, and hempen coils unloose. 
He whirls impetuous through the crimson tide. 
Nor heeds the death that quivers in his side ; 
Northward he rushes with impulsive fin. 
Where shores of crystal groan with ocean's din, 
Shores that will melt with pity's glow more soon 
Than the hard heart that launched the fierce harpoon. 

178 



POETIC DICTION 

In vain ! lie dies ! yet not without avail 
The blubbery bulk between his nose and tail. 
Soon shall that bulk, in liquid amber stored, 
Shed smiling plenty round some Lapland board. 
Dream not, ye nymphs that flutter round the tray 
When suns declining shut the door of day. 
While China's herb, infused with art, ye sip, 
And toast and scandal share the eager lip. 
Dream not to you alone that Life is kind, 
Nor Hyson's charms alone can soothe the mind; 
If you are blest, ah, how more blest is he 
By kinder fate shut far from tears and tea, 
Who marks, replenished by his duteous hand. 
Dark faces oleaginously expand ; 
And while you faint to see the scalding doom 
Invade with stains the pride of Persia's loom, 
Happier in skins than you in silks perhaps. 
Deals the bright train-oil to his little Lap's. 



179 



LECTURE XI 

WORDSWORTH 

(Tuesday Evening, February 13, 1855) 



12* 



XI 



A FEW remarks upon two of the more distin- 
guished poets of the eighteenth century will 
be a fitting introduction to Wordsworth, and, in- 
deed, a kind of commentary on his poetry. Of 
two of these poets we find very evident traces 
in him — Thomson and Cowper — of the one in 
an indiscriminating love of nature, of the other 
in a kind of domestic purity, and of both in the 
habit of treating subjects essentially prosaic, in 
verse; whence a somewhat swelling wordiness is 
inevitable. 

Thomson had the good luck to be born in Scot- 
land, and to be brought up by parents remark- 
able for simplicity and piety of life. Living in the 
country till he was nearly twenty, he learned to 
love natural beauty, and must have been an atten- 
tive student of scenery. That he had true instincts 
in poetry is proved by his making Milton and 
Spenser his models. He was a man of force and 

183 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

originality, and English poetry owes him a large 
debt as the first who stood out both in precept and 
practice against the vicious artificial style which 
then reigned, and led the way back to purer tastes 
and deeper principles. He was a man perfectly 
pure in life; the associate of eminent and titled 
personages, without being ashamed of the little mil- 
liner's shop of his sisters in Edinburgh ; a lover of 
freedom, and a poet who never lost a friend, nor 
ever wrote a line of which he could repent. The 
licentiousness of the age could not stain him. His 
poem of " Winter " was published a year before the 
appearance of the " Dunciad." 

Thomson's style is not equal to his conceptions. 
It is generally lumbering and diffuse, and rather 
stilted than lofty. It is very likely that his Scotch 
birth had something to do with this, and that he 
could not write English with that unconsciousness 
without which elegance is out of the question — for 
there can be no true elegance without freedom. 
Burns's English letters and poems are examples 
of this. 

But there are passages in Thomson's poems full 
of the truest feelings for nature, and gleams of pure 
imagination. 

Mr. Lowell here read a passage from '' Summer," 
which, he said, illustrated better than almost any 

184 



WORDSWORTH 

other his excellences and defects. It is a descrip- 
tion of a storm, beginning: 

At first heard solemn o'er the verge of Heaven 
The tempest growls. 

This is fustian patched with cloth of gold. The 
picture, fine as it is in parts, is too much frittered 
with particulars. The poet's imagination does not 
seem powerful enough to control the language. 
There is no autocratic energy, but the sentences 
are like unruly barons, each doing what he likes in 
his own province. Many of them are prosaic and 
thoroughly liwpicturesque, and come under the fatal 
condemnation of being Jiat, Yet throughout the 
passage. 

The nnconquerahle genius struggles through 

half- suffocated in a cloud of words. 

But the metre is hitchy and broken, and seems 
to have no law but that of fi\e feet to the verse. 
There is no Pegasean soar, but the unwieldy gallop 
of an ox. The imagination, which Thomson un- 
doubtedly had, contrasted oddly with the lumber- 
ing vehicle of his diction. He takes a bushel- 
basket to bring home an ^gg in. In him poetry 
and prose entered into partnership, and poetry was 

185 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

the sleeping partner who comes down now and 
then to see how the business is getting on. But he 
had the soul of a poet, and that is the main thing; 

Of G-ray and Collins there is no occasion to speak 
at length in this place. Both of them showed true 
poetic imagination. In Grray it was thwarted by 
an intellectual timidity that looked round continu- 
ally for precedent; and Collins did not live long 
enough to discharge his mind thoroughly of classic 
pedantry ; but both of them broke away from the 
reigning style of decorous frigidity. Collins's "Ode 
to Evening" is enough to show that he had a sin- 
cere love of nature — but generally the scenery of 
both is borrowed from books. 

In Cowper we find the same over-minuteness in 
describing which makes Thomson wearisome, but 
relieved by a constant vivacity of fancy which in 
Thomson was entirely wanting. But Cowper more 
distinctly preluded Wordsworth in his delight in 
simple things, in finding themes for his song in the 
little incidents of his own fireside life, or his daily 
walks, and especially in his desire to make poetry a 
means of conveying moral truth. The influence of 
Cowper may be traced clearly in some of Words- 
worth's minor poems of pure fancy, and there is 
one poem of his — that on " Yardly Oak" — which 
is almost perfectly Words worthian. But Cowper 

186 



WORDSWORTH 

rarely rises above the region of fancy, and he often 
applied verse to themes that would not sing. His 
poetry is never more than agreeable, and never 
reaches down to the deeper sources of delight. 
Cowper was one of those men who, wanting a vig- 
orous understanding to steady the emotional part 
of his nature, may be called peculiar rather than 
original. Grreat poetry can never be made out of 
a morbid temperament, and great wits are com- 
monly the farthest removed from madness. But 
Cowper had at least the power of believing that his 
own thoughts and pleasures were as good, and as 
fit for poetry, as those of any man, no matter how 
long he had enjoyed the merit of being dead. 

The closing years of the eighteenth century have 
something in common with those of the sixteenth. 
The air was sparkling with moral and intellectual 
stimulus. The tremble of the French Eevolution 
ran through all Europe, and probably England, 
since the time of the great Puritan revolt, had never 
felt such a thrill of national and indigenous senti- 
ment as during the Napoleonic wars. It was a time 
fitted to give birth to something original in lit- 
erature. If from the collision of minds sparks of 
wit and fancy fly out, the shock and jostle of great 
events, of world-shaping ideas, and of nations who 
do their work without knowing it, strike forth a 

187 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

fire that kindles heart and brain and tongue to 
more inspired conceptions and utterances. 

:It was fortunate for Wordsworth that he had his 
breeding in the country, and not only so, but among 
the grandest scenery of England. His earliest as- 
sociates were the mountains, lakes, and streams of 
his native district, and the scenery with which his 
mind was stored during its most impressionable 
period was noble and pure. The people, also, among 
whom he grew up were a simple and hardy race, 
who kept alive the traditions and many of the 
habits of a more picturesque time. There was also 
a general equality of condition which kept life from 
becoming conventional and trite, and which cher- 
ished friendly human sympathies. When death 
knocked at any door of the hamlet, there was an 
echo from every fireside ; and a wedding dropped an 
orange blossom at every door. There was not a 
grave in the little churchyard but had its story; 
not a crag or glen or aged tree without its legend. 
The occupations of the people, who were mostly 
small farmers and shepherds, were such as fostered 
independence and originality of character. And 
where everybody knew everybody, and everybody's 
father had known everybody's father, and so on 
immemorially, the interest of man in man was not 
likely to become a matter of cold hearsay and dis- 

188 



WORDSWORTH 

tant report. It was here that Wordsworth learned 
not only to love the simplicity of nature, but like- 
wise that homely and earnest manliness which 
gives such depth and sincerity to his poems. 
Travel, intercourse with societj^, scholarly culture, 
nothing could cover up or obliterate those early im- 
pressions. They widened with the range of his 
knowledge and added to his power of expression, 
but they never blunted that fine instinct in him 
which enables him always to speak directly to men 
and to gentleman, or scholar, or citizen. It was 
this that enabled his poetry afterwards to con- 
quer all the reviews of England. The great art of 
being a man, the sublime mystery of being your- 
self^ is something to which one must be appren- 
ticed early. 

Mr. Lowell here gave an outline of Wordsworth's 
personal history and character. 

As a man we fancy him just in the least degree 
uninteresting — if the horrid word must come out 
— why, a little bit of a bore. One must regard him 
as a prophet in order to have the right kind of feel- 
ing toward him ; and prophets are excellent for 
certain moods of mind, but perhaps are creatures 

Too bright and good 
For human nature's dail}^ food. 

189 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

I fancy from what I have heard from those who 
knew him that he had a tremendous prose-power, 
and that, with his singing-robes off, he was dry and 
stiff as a figure-head. He had a purity of mind 
approaching almost to prudery, and a pupil of Dr. 
Arnold told me he had heard him say once at din- 
ner that he thought the first line of Keats's ode 
to a " Grecian Urn " indecorous. The boys consid- 
ered him rather slow. There was something rocky 
and unyielding in his mind ; something that, if we 
found it in a man we did not feel grateful to and 
respect, we should call hard. ' Even his fancy some- 
times is glittering and stiff, like crystallizations in 
granite. ("But at other times how tender and deli- 
cate and dewy from very contrast, like harebells 
growing in a crag-cleft ! 

■ There seem to have been two distinct natures in 
him — Wordsworth the poet, and Wordsworth the 
man who used to talk about Wordsworth the poet. 
One played a kind of Baruch to the other's Jeremiah, 
and thought a great deal of his master the prophet. 
Baruch was terrifically t/fdnspired, and was in the 
habit of repeating Jeremiah's poems at rather more 
length than was desired, selecting commonly the 
parts which pleased him, Baruch, the best. » Baruch 
Wordsworth used to praise Jeremiah Wordsworth, 
and used to tell entertaining anecdotes of him, — 

190 



WORDSWORTH 

how he one day saw an old woman and the next 
did nof^ and so came home and dictated some 
verses on this remarkable phenomenon; and how 
another day he saw a cow. 

But in reading Wordsworth we must skip all the 
Baruch interpolations, and cleave wholly to Jere- 
miah, who is truly inspired and noble — more so 
than any modern. We are too near him, perhaps, 
to be able wholly to separate the personal from the 
poetical. I acknowledge that I reverence the noble 
old man both for his grand life and his poems, that 
are worthy expressions of it. But a lecturer is 
under bonds to speak what he believes to be the 
truth. While I think that Wordsworth's poetry is 
a thing by itself, both in its heights and depths, 
something sacred and apart, I cannot but acknow- 
ledge that his prosing is sometimes a gift as pe- 
culiar to himself. Like old Ben Jonson, he appar- 
ently wished that a great deal of what he wrote 
should be called "works." Especially is this true 
of his larger poems, like the " Excursion " and the 
" Prelude." However small, however commonplace 
the thought, the ponderous machine of his verse 
runs on like a railway train that must start at a 
certain hour though the only passenger be the boy 
that cries lozenges. He seems to have thought that 
inspiration was something that could be turned on 

191 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

like steam. Walter Savage Landor told me that he 
once said to Wordsworth : " Mr. Wordsworth, a man 
may mix as much poetry with prose as he likes, 
and it will make it the better; but the moment he 
mixes a bit of prose with his poetry, it precipi- 
tates the whole." Wordsworth, he added, never 
forgave him. 

(There was a great deal in Wordsworth's character 
that reminds us of Milton; the same self-reliance, 
the same purity and loftiness of purpose, and, I sus- 
pect, the same personal dryness of temperament 
and seclusion of self. He seems to have had a pro- 
founder imagination than Milton, but infinitely less 
music, less poetical faculty. I am not entirely satis- 
fied of the truth of the modern philosophy which, 
if a man knocks another on the head, transfers all 
the guilt to some peccant bump on his own occiput 
or sinciput ; but if we measure Wordsworth in this 
way, I feel as if he had plenty of forehead, but that 
he wanted hind-head, and would have been more 
entirely satisfactory if he had had one of the philo- 
someth ing-or-other. 

It cannot be denied that in Wordsworth the very 
highest powers of the poetical mind were associ- 
ated with a certain tendency to the diffuse and 
commonplace. It is in the Understanding (always 
prosaic) that the great golden veins of his imagina- 

192 



WORDSWORTH 

tion are embedded. He wrote too much to write 
always well ; for it is not a great Xerxes army of 
words, but a compact Greek ten thousand that 
march safely down to posterity.) He sets tasks 
to the divine faculty, which is much the same as 
trying to make Jove's eagle do the service of a 
clucking hen. Throughout the " Prelude " and the 
" Excursion," he seems striving to bind the wizard 
imagination with the sand-ropes of dry disquisi- 
tion, and to have forgotten the potent spell-word 
which would make the particulars adhere. There 
is an arenaceous quality in the style which makes 
progress wearisome; yet with what splendors of 
mountain-sunsets are we not rewarded ! What 
golden rounds of verse do we not see stretching 
heavenward, with angels ascending and descend- 
ing ! What haunting melodies hover around us, 
deep and eternal, like the undying barytone of the 
sea! And if we are compelled to fare through 
sands and desert wilderness, how often do we not 
hear airy shapes that syllable our names with a 
startling personal appeal to our highest conscious- 
ness and our noblest aspiration, such as we might 
wait for in vain in any other poet. 

!Take from Wordsworth all which an honest criti- 
cism cannot but allow, and what is left will show 
how truly great he was. He had no humor, no 

13 193 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

dramatic power, and his temperameDt was of that 
dry and juiceless quality that in all his published 
correspondence you shall not find a letter, but only 
essays. If we consider carefully where he was 
most successful, we shall find that it was not so 
much in description of natural scenery, or delinea- 
tion of character, as in vivid expression of the ef- 
fect produced by external objects and events upon 
his own mind. His finest passages are always 
monologues. He had a fondness for particulars, 
and there are parts of his poems which remind us 
of local histories in the undue importance given to 
trivial matter. He was the historian of Words- 
worthshire. This power of particularization (for it 
is as truly a power as generalization) is what gives 
such vigor and greatness to single lines and senti- 
ments of Wordsworth, and to poems developing a 
single thought or word. It was this that made him 
so fond of the sonnet. His mind had not that 
reach and elemental movement of Milton's which, 
like the trade-winds, gathered to itself thoughts 
and images like stately fleets from every quarter; 
some, deep with silks and spicery, come brooding 
over the silent thunders of their battailous arma- 
ments, but all swept forward in their destined 
track, over the long billows of his verse, every inch 
of canvas strained by the unifying breath of their 

194 



WORDSWORTH 

common epic impulse. It was an organ that Milton 
mastered, mighty in compass, capable equally of 
the trumpet's ardors, or the slim delicacy of the 
flute; and sometimes it bursts forth in great 
crashes through his prose, as if he touched it for 
solace in the intervals of his toil. If Wordsworth 
sometimes puts the trumpet to his lips, yet he lays it 
aside soon and willingly for his appropriate instru- 
ment, the pastoral reed. And it is not one that 
grew by any vulgar stream, but that which Apollo 
breathed through tending the flocks of Admetus, 
that which Pan endowed with every melody of the 
visible universe, the same in which the soul of the 
despairing nymph took refuge and gifted with her 
dual nature, so that ever and anon, amid notes of 
human joy and sorrow, there comes suddenly a 
deeper and almost awful tone, thrilling us into dim 
consciousness of a forgotten divinity. 

Of no other poet, except Shakspeare, have so 
many phrases become household words as of 
Wordsworth. If Pope has made current more epi- 
grams of worldly wisdom, to Wordsworth belongs 
the nobler praise of having defined for us, and 
given us for a daily possession, those faint and 
vague suggestions of other- worldliness of whose 
gentler ministry with our baser nature the hurry 
and bustle of life scarcely ever allowed us to be 

195 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

conscious. He has won for himself a secure im- 
mortality by a depth of intuition which makes only 
the best minds at their best hours worthy, or indeed 
capable, of his companionship, and by a homely 
sincerity of human sympathy which reaches the 
humblest heart. Our language owes him gratitude 
for the purity and abstinence of his style, and we 
who speak it, for having emboldened us to trust 
ourselves to take delight in simple things, and to 
trust ourselves to our own instincts. And he hath 
his reward. It needs not to 

Bid Beaumont lie 
A little farther off to make him room, 

for there is no fear of crowding in that little so- 
ciety with whom he is now enrolled as the fifth in 
the succession of the great English poets. 



196 



LECTUKE XII 

THE FUNCTION OF THE POET 

{Friday Evening, February 16, 1855) 



14 



XII 



WHETHER, as some philosophers here assume, 
we possess only the fragments of a great 
cycle of knowledge, in whose center stood the 
primeval man in friendly relation with the powers 
of the universe, and build our hovels out of the ruins 
of our ancestral palace; or whether, according to 
the developing theory of others, we are rising grad- 
ually and have come up from an atom instead of 
descending from an Adam, so that the proudest 
pedigree might run up to a barnacle or a zoophyte 
at last, are questions which will keep for a good 
many centuries yet. Confining myself to what lit- 
tle we can learn from History, we find tribes rising 
slowly out of barbarism to a higher or lower point 
of culture and civility, and everywhere the poet also 
is found under one name or another, changing in 
certain outward respects, but essentially the same. 
But however far we go back, we shall find this 
also — that the poet and the priest were united 
originally in the same person: which means that 

199 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

the poet was he who was conscious of the world of 
sphit as well as that of sense, and was the am- 
bassador of the gods to men. This was his highest 
function, and hence his name of seer. 

I suppose the word epic originally meant nothing 
more than this, that the poet was the person who 
was the greatest master of speech. His were the 
sTTsa TTTspdsvxa, the true winged words that could fly 
down the unexplored future and carry thither the 
names of ancestral heroes, of the brave, and wise, 
and good. It was thus that the poet could reward 
virtue, and, by and by, as society grew more com- 
plex, could burn in the brand of shame. This is 
Homer's character of Demodocus in the eighth 
book of the "Odyssey," 

When the Muse loved and gave the good and ill, 

the gift of conferring good or evil immortality. 

The first histories were in verse, and, sung as 
they were at the feasts and gatherings of the peo- 
ple, they awoke in men the desire of fame, which 
is the first promoter of courage and self -trust, be- 
cause it teaches men by degrees to appeal from the 
present to the future. We may fancy what the 
influence of the early epics was when they were 
recited to men who claimed the heroes celebrated 
in them for their ancestors, by what Bouchardon, 

200 



THE FUNCTION OF THE POET 

the sculptor, said only two centuries ago : " When 
I read Homer I feel as if I were twenty feet high." 

Nor have poets lost their power over the future 
in modern times. Dante lifts up by the hair the 
face of some petty traitor, the Smith and Brown of 
some provincial Italian town, lets the fire of his In- 
ferno glare upon it for a moment, and it is printed 
forever on the memory of mankind. The histo- 
rians may iron out the shoulders of Richard III. 
as smooth as they can ; they will never get over 
the wrench that Shakspeare gave them. 

The peculiarity of almost all early literature is 
that it seems to have a double meaning; that un- 
derneath its natural we find ourselves continually 
seeing and suspecting a supernatural meaning. 
Even in the older epics the characters seem to be 
only half- historical and half -typical. They appear 
as the Pilgrim Fathers do in Twenty-second of De- 
cember speeches at Plymouth. The names may be 
historical, but the attributes are ideal. The orator 
draws a portrait rather of what he thinks the 
founders ought to have been than a likeness which 
contemporaries would have recognized. Thus did 
early poets endeavor to make reality out of ap- 
pearances. For, except a few typical men in whom 
certain ideas get embodied, the generations of man- 
kind are mere apparitions who come out of the 

14* 201 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

dark for a purposeless moment, and enter the 
dark again after they have performed the nothing 
they came for. 

The poet's gift, then, is that of seer. He it is 
that discovers the truth as it exists in types and 
images ; that is the spiritual meaning, which abides 
forever under the sensual. And his instinct is to 
express himself also in types and images. But it 
was not only necessary that he himself should be 
delighted with his vision, but that he should inter- 
est his hearers with the faculty divine. Pm^e truth 
is not acceptable to the mental palate. It must be 
diluted with character and incident ; it must be hu- 
manized in order to be attractive. If the bones of 
a mastodon be exhumed, a crowd will gather out of 
curiosity ; but let the skeleton of a man be turned 
up, and what a difference in the expression of the 
features ! Every bystander then creates his little 
drama, in which those whitened bones take flesh 
upon them and stalk as chief actor. 

The poet is he who can best see or best say what 
is ideal; what belongs to the world of soul and of 
beauty. Whether he celebrates the brave and good, 
or the gods, or the beautiful as it appears in man 
or nature, something of a religious character still 
clings to him. He may be unconscious of his mis- 
sion ; he may be false to it, but in proportion as he 

202 



THE FUNCTION OF THE POET 

is a great poet, he rises to the level of it more of- 
ten. He does not always directly rebuke what is 
bad or base, but indirectly, by making ns feel what 
delight there is in the good and fair. If he besiege 
evil it is with such beautiful engines of war (as Plu- 
tarch tells us of Demetrius) that the besieged them- 
selves are charmed with them. Whoever reads the 
great poets cannot but be made better by it, for 
they always introduce him to a higher society, to a 
greater style of manners and of thinking. Whoever 
learns to love what is beautiful is made incapable 
of the mean and low and bad. It is something to 
be thought of, that all the great poets have been 
good men. He who translates the divine into the 
vulgar, the spiritual into the sensual, is the reverse 
of a poet. 

It seems to be thought that we have come upon 
the earth too late; that there has been a feast of the 
imagination formerly, and all that is left for us is 
to steal the scraps. We hear that there is no poetry 
in railroads, steamboats, and telegraphs, and espe- 
cially in Brother Jonathan. If this be true, so much 
the worse for him. But, because he is a materialist, 
shall there be no poets ! When we have said that 
we live in a materialistic age, we have said some- 
thing which meant more than we intended. If we 
say it in the way of blame, we have said a foolish 

203 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

thing, for probably one age is as good as another ; 
and, at any rate, the worst is good enough com- 
pany for us. The age of Shakspeare seems richer 
than our own only because he was lucky enough to 
have such a pair of eyes as his to see it and such a 
gift as his to report it. Shakspeare did not sit 
down and cry for the water of Helicon to turn the 
wheels of his little private mill there at the Bank- 
side. He appears to have gone more quietly about 
his business than any playwright in London ; to 
have drawn off what water-power he wanted from 
the great prosy current of affairs that flows alike 
for all, and in spite of all ; to have ground for the 
public what grist they want, coarse or fine ; and it 
seems a mere piece of luck that the smooth stream 
of his activity reflected with ravishing clearness 
every changing mood of heaven and earth, every 
stick and stone, every dog and clown and courtier 
that stood upon its brink. It is a curious illustra- 
tion of the friendly manner in which Shakspeare 
received everything that came along, of what a 
present man he was, that in the very same year 
that the mulberry tree was brought into England, 
he got one and planted it in his garden at Stratford. 
It is perfectly true that this is a materialistic age, 
and for this very reason we want our poets all the 
more. We find that every generation contrives to 

204 



THE FUNCTION OF THE POET 

catch its singing larks without the sky's falling. 
When the poet comes he always turns out to be the 
man who discovers that the passing moment is the 
inspired one, and that the secret of poetry is not to 
have lived in Homer's day or Dante's, but to be 
alive now. To be alive now, that is the great art 
and mystery. They are dead men who live in the 
past, and men yet unborn who live in the future. 
We are like Hans-in-Luck, forever exchanging the 
burthensome good we have for something else, till 
at last we come home empty-handed. The people 
who find their own age prosaic are those who see 
only its costume. And this is what makes it pro- 
saic : that we have not faith enough in ourselves to 
think that our own clothes are good enough to be 
presented to Posterity in. The artists seem to 
think that the court dress of posterity is that of 
Vandyke's time or Caesar's. I have seen the model 
of a statue of Sir Robert Peel — a statesman whose 
merit consisted in yielding gracefully to the pres- 
ent — in which the sculptor had done his best to 
travesty the real man into a make-believe Roman. 
At the period when England produced its greatest 
poets, we find exactly the reverse of this, and we 
are thankful to the man who made the monument 
of Lord Bacon that he had genius enough to copy 
every button of his dress, everything down to the 

205 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

rosettes on his shoes. These men had faith even in 
their own shoe-strings. Till Dante's time the Ital- 
ian poets thought no language good enough to put 
their nothings into but Latin (and, indeed, a dead 
tongue was the best for dead thoughts), but Dante 
found the common speech of Florence, in which 
men bargained, and scolded, and made love, good 
enough for him, and out of the world around him 
made such a poem as no Roman ever sang. 

We cannot get rid of our wonder, we who have 
brought down the w41d lightning from writing fiery 
doom upon the walls of heaven to be our errand- 
boy and penny postman. In this day of news- 
papers and electric telegraphs, in which common- 
sense and ridicule can magnetise a whole continent 
between dinner and tea, we may say that such a 
phenomenon as Mahomet were impossible ; and be- 
hold Joe Smith and the State of Deseret ! Turning 
over the yellow leaves of the same copy of Webster 
on "Witchcraft" which Cotton Mather studied, I 
thought. Well, that goblin is laid at last ! And 
while I mused, the tables were dancing and the 
chairs beating the devil's tattoo all over Christen- 
dom. I have a neighbor who dug down through 
tough strata of clay-slate to a spring pointed out by 
a witch-hazel rod in the hands of a seventh son's 
seventh son, and the water is sweeter to him for 

206 



THE FUNCTION OF THE POET 

the wonder that is mixed with it. After all, it 
seems that our scientific gas, be it never so bril- 
liant, is not equal to the dingy old Aladdin's lamp. 

It is impossible for men to live in the world with- 
out poetry of some sort or another. If they cannot 
get the best, they will get at some substitute for it. 
But there is as much poetry as ever in the world if 
we can ever know how to find it out ; and as much 
imagination, perhaps, only that it takes a more pro- 
saic direction. Every man who meets with misfor- 
tune, who is stripped of his material prosperity, 
finds that he has a little outlying mountain-farm of 
imagination, which does not appear in the schedule 
of his effects, on which his spirit is able to keep 
alive, though he never thought of it while he was 
fortunate. Job turns out to be a great poet as soon 
as his flocks and herds are taken away from him. 

Perhaps our continent will begin to sing by and 
by, as the others have done. We have had the 
Practical forced upon us by our condition. We 
have had a whole hemisphere to clear up and put 
to rights. And we are descended from men who 
were hardened and stiffened by a downright wrestle 
with Necessity. There was no chance for poetry 
among the Puritans. And yet if any people have a 
right to imagination, it should be the descendants 
of those very Puritans. They had enough of it, or 

207 



LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY 

they could not have conceived the great epic they 
did, whose books are States, and which is written 
on this continent from Maine to California. 

John Quincy Adams, making a speech at New 
Bedford many years ago, reckoned the number of 
whale ships (if I remember rightly) that sailed out 
of that port, and, comparing it with some former 
period, took it as a type of American success. But, 
alas ! it is with quite other oil that those far-shining 
lamps of a nation's true glory which burn forever 
must be filled. It is not by any amount of material 
splendor or prosperity, but only by moral greatness, 
by ideas, by works of the imagination, that a race 
can conquer the future. No voice comes to us from 
the once mighty Assyria but the hoot of the owl 
that nests amid her crumbling palaces ; of Carthage, 
whose merchant fleets once furled their sails in 
every port of the known world, nothing is left but 
the deeds of Hannibal. She lies dead on the shore 
of her once subject sea, and the wind of the desert 
flings its handfuls of burial-sand upon her corpse. 
A fog can blot Holland or Switzerland out of exist- 
ence. But how large is the space occupied in the 
maps of the soul by little Athens or powerless Italy. 
They were great by the soul, and their vital force is 
as indestructible as the soul. 

Till America has learned to love Art, not as an 

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THE FUNCTION OF THE POET 

amusement, not as a mere ornament of her cities, not 
as a superstition of what is comnie ilfaiit for a great 
nation, but for its harmonizing and ennobling en- 
ergy, for its power of making men better by arousing 
in them the perception of their own instincts for what 
is beautiful and sacred and religious, and an eternal 
rebuke of the base and worldly, she will not have 
succeeded in that high sense which alone makes a 
nation out of a people, and raises it from a dead name 
to a living power. Were our little mother-island 
sunk beneath the sea ; or worse, were she conquered 
by Scythian barbarians, yet Shakspeare would be 
an immortal England, and would conquer countries 
when the bones of her last sailor had kept their 
ghastly watch for ages in unhallowed ooze beside 
the quenched thunders of her navy. 

This lesson I learn from the past: that grace and 
goodness, the fair, the noble, and the true will never 
cease out of the world till the God from whom they 
emanate ceases out of it ; that the sacred duty and 
noble office of the poet is to reveal and justify them 
to man ; that as long as the soul endures, endures 
also the theme of new and unexampled song ; that 
while there is grace in grace, love in love, and 
beauty in beauty, God will still send poets to find 
them, and bear witness of them, and to hang their 
ideal portraitures in the gallery of memory. God 

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LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY {*' 



t(;i^/^ 1/5 is forever the mystical theme of the hour 
that is passing. The lives of the great poets teach 
lis that they were men of their generation who felt 
most deeply the meaning of the Present. 

I have been more painfully conscious than any 
one else could be of the inadequacy of what I have 
been able to say, when compared to the richness 
and variety of my theme. I shall endeavor to 
make my apology in verse, and will bid you fare- 
well in a little poem in which I have endeavored to 
express the futility of all effort to speak the loveli- 
ness of things, and also my theory of where the 
Muse is to be found, if ever. It is to her that I 
sing my hymn, 

Mr. Lowell here read an original poem of con- 
siderable length, which concluded the lecture, and 
was received with bursts of applause. 



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